Rewilding My Lot

Among the insects that live in or visit the garden are wasps. The ones I see most often are Apache Paper Wasps (Polistes apachus), which build hanging nests (as distinct from yellowjackets, which live underground). I wrote about some things that I’ve learned about paper wasps in a previous post.

Paper wasps can be beneficial with their pollination and predation activities, so if they’re not in my way I leave them alone. They will sting to defend their nests, though, so there are some instances where I have removed nests.

A few days ago I was putting some kitchen scraps in our tumbling composter. As I do every few days I gave it a good heave to rotate it. When I did that I saw a wasp nest spinning in front of me with presumably some rather surprised wasps. I retreated quickly without waiting to take a photograph.

The underside of my tumbling composter is NOT a good place for a wasp nest! So I was prepared to kill the nest and its occupants later in the evening (dusk is when they tend to be back at the nest and calmest), but when I looked at that time there were no adults present. It was the same the next day, so I think I must have startled them enough to abandon the nest. At that point I just cut the nest down and crushed it. There were some eggs in the cells.