Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you have friends who mow large areas, you know how dangerous underground yellow jacket nests can be to those persons. Yellow jackets, like most other social insects, overwinter as fertilized queens who begin the process of constructing a paper nests from scratch as spring arrives. The adults feed on nectar and fruit (one reason people often plant orchards away from their houses) but feed the young with partially digested invertebrates. Yellow jacket colonies live longer in the fall than other social wasps and can be especially troublesome to humans then when they can no longer find nectar and fruit. Just as we begin to enjoy picnics with cooler weather, these stinging insects are drawn to garbage cans and picnic shelters and will aggressively compete for our lunch! Sportsmen use a technique called bee-lining to locate nests – they use the larvae for fish bait!
Yellow Jackets
