3 Places Where Wasps Go During The Winter & Hibernate

Maybe your like

Like sunshine and sandy beaches, wasps are a natural part of summer. In fact, swatting a hovering wasp away from your juicy watermelon has become somewhat of a summer tradition in most places. But have you ever wondered where wasps go during the winter months, and how this knowledge might help you prevent them from nesting in your yard in spring?

A large majority of a wasp colony won’t live through the winter. The ones that survive (mainly fertile queens) do so because they find a suitable place to hibernate. Wasps look for areas to provide them protection and will hibernate in your home, the ground, wood, trees, and within debris.

It’s very easy to stumble across a hidden and hibernating nest. This is especially true during early spring when you’re most likely to be picking up debris and clutter. Knowing about the places where wasps go during the winter will help you eliminate these areas from your home and lawn, reduce your chance of having a problem in the spring, and prevent any unwanted encounters.

* This post contains affiliate links.

Do Wasps Survive Cold Winters?

Some insects (including dragonfly nymphs and some species of tick) can survive the winter, but are wasps one of those insects?

According to a study published in the Journal of Insect Physiology, wasps become inactive when temperatures drop to 70 degrees Fahrenheit or below. During this time, wasps won’t fly but may still be active inside the nest.

Freezing temperatures will eliminate most social wasps except for fertile queens, who will find places to hibernate through the winter.

A queen wasp will hibernate by finding a sheltered spot and tucking its antennae and wings around its body. Depending on what type of wasp the queen is, she’ll either produce glycerol (which acts as an antifreeze in the blood) or freeze solid as a result of ice forming around the cells.

Wasps nesting in your home can survive the winter since the temperatures inside won’t drop below freezing. However, they still need a source of food and water. Since the main purpose of the colony is to keep the queen alive, food may be rationed and fed to her, but this means that many wasps won’t survive the winter if there’s a lack of food.

Figuring out where wasps go during the winter and preventing hibernating spots is the first level of defense against springtime nest builds!

3 Places Where Wasps Go During the Winter to Hibernate

Social wasps live in colonies inside nests that they construct throughout the summer. However, most cannot survive cold weather. The ones who survive (mostly queens) do so by finding a sheltered place to hibernate through the winter.

The three main places where queen wasps look for shelter include:

Inside your home
In the ground
In leaf litter and wood piles

In the spring, queens emerge and immediately look for new nesting spots to begin construction to lay their first eggs. You can read about the 5 things that attract wasps to your yard in the spring to learn about ways to prevent wasps from building nests.

You may stumble across an area housing dozens of hibernating queens. This is not a nest. Some queens will hibernate together. However, in the spring, they’ll all go their separate ways, hoping to start a colony of their own.

But where do wasps go in the winter?

1. Wasps Will Nest Inside Your Home

During the spring, queens will come out of hibernation and search for a suitable place to create a new nest. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be inside your home. Wasps will build nests in ceilings, attics, walls, and basements.

If the nest is active throughout the summer (and temperatures don’t drop below freezing), it could overwinter in your house. During this time, the queen will stop laying eggs and may sleep or hibernate.

You might think this would be a safe time to remove the nest. However, because of a lack of food and an urge to keep the queen alive, wasps may become extremely aggressive in the winter. If you find an overwintering nest, it’s best to contact a pest control professional to handle it.

How To Prevent Wasps From Nesting In Your Home

Queens look for nesting spots that provide protection, safety, access to materials they can use to build their nest, and a food source. Your home checks many of these boxes. Luckily, there are a few things you can do to make your home less attractive to new queens.

When trying to find a place to nest, queens look for areas that aren’t easily accessible to other predatory animals, and your home is a pre-built fortress.

You can do several things to ensure wasps do not nest inside your house:

Seal cracks: Seal any cracks or crevices along the outside border of your home.
Keep exterior walls clear: Keep bushes and grasses from touching the walls of your house.
Replace damaged wood: Replace old or damaged wood and siding.
Replace damaged screens: Inspect screens for rips or tears that a wasp could pass through.
Seal gaps: Look for gaps along the edges of doors or pet access doors.
Seal vents: Put screens on any laundry or exhaust vents.
Cover garbage cans: Keep lids tightly sealed on garbage cans and clean up any food spills.
Pick up fruit: If you have fruit trees, harvest the fruit as soon as its ripe and pick up any fallen fruit.
Don’t leave food out: Remove all food from decks and patios as soon as you are done eating.
Hummingbird feeders: The sugary substance in hummingbird feeders attracts bees and wasps. Keep them away from your home when possible.

Besides protection, a queen will also look for a viable food source when trying to find a place to nest in the spring, and many species of wasps are known for feeding on human food. Keep all food securely stored away and clean up any food or sugary drink spills, especially those that happen outdoors.

You can read our full list of the ways that wasps get into your house here.

2. Wasps Hibernate In the Ground

Not all wasp species will build nests in structures or trees. Instead, they prefer to go underground. The entrance to the nest is visible as a small hole in the ground, but otherwise, the rest of the nest is invisible.

According to the College of Agricultural, Consumer & Environmental Sciences, yellowjackets build underground nests that can reach up to four feet in diameter and contain as many as 1,500 wasps. That’s huge!

During the winter, the queen will hibernate in deep underground burrows or other protected locations, such as tree stumps or logs.

You don’t have to worry if you find an abandoned nest underground. Yellowjackets don’t rescue old nests and won’t return to the site again next year. However, you can seal the hole to prevent other insects from invading the nest in the future.

Identifying and Preventing Underground Nests

It’s impossible to know where a queen will hibernate underground, so you should focus on keeping the emerging queens from entering bothersome areas in the spring rather than trying to eliminate hibernating queens.

Here are some ways to spot an underground nest in the spring:

Dirt piles: As they burrow, queen wasps pull dirt up out of the ground and deposit it by the entrance of the nest. This creates a cylindrical pile of dirt (similar to those found by the entrances of ant hills), which can be used to identify an underground burrow.
Activity: In the spring, activity may be low. If you notice wasps buzzing around a hole in the ground, it’s likely an underground nest.
Location: Queen wasps often look for abandoned rodent holes to build their nest. They’ll also build nests near sources of food and water. Check for nests near streams, woodpiles, logs, fruit trees, and tree trunks.

If you find an underground nest in the spring, it’s essential to act quickly before the colony builds to unmanageable levels. Use an insecticidal dust like Sevin Insect Killer Dust.

For underground nests, dust is far more effective than sprays because the wasps will carry the dust to the heart of the colony, spreading the insecticide to eliminate the entire nest. Sprays, on the other hand, may only penetrate the surface and allow the inner nest to survive.

If you’d like to learn more, check out our guide on where wasps go during the day!

Wasps Hibernate In Leaf Litter or Wood Piles

Most species of social wasps will abandon their nests when temperatures drop. Male drones go searching for new queens to mate with before succumbing to the cold. New queens will mate, becoming fertile, before finding a place to hibernate through the winter.

Wasps look for any area that will offer them suitable protection through the winter. This can be under leaf litter, in woodpiles, in old logs, under the bark of trees, or in other small spaces.

Although one solitary wasp hibernating through the winter may not be a problem now, they can become a nuisance in the spring when they build a new colony.

How To Prevent Hibernating Wasps In Leaf Litter and Wood Piles

You can reduce the chance of wasps building nests in the spring by eliminating possible hibernation areas around your home:

Clean up piles of leaves and other debris
Remove old, rotten stumps and logs from your property
Replace old, rotten wood in decks and porches
Look for small areas where a wasp might hibernate
Seal up playhouses and treehouses during the winter
Bring in birdhouses or routinely check them for unwanted pests
Put tarps or build structures around wood piles

Wasps are drawn to different colors, and learning about the colors wasps are attracted to could help you spot any potential hibernation areas as well!

Preparing For Spring: How To Determine If A Wasp Nest Is Active

As wasps emerge from their hibernating spots and begin new colonies, it’s important to know when a new nest is active. Finding a nest early in the season is preferable because there will be fewer wasps to defend the nest, making it easier to remove.

Here are some signs that a wasp nest is active:

Activity: If you see wasps going in and out of a crack, crevice, or the small papery beginning of a nest, it’s likely active.
Noise: Wasps make a distinctive buzzing noise. If you’re hearing a lot of buzzing around eaves and typical nest locations, it’s probably an active nest.
Growth: If you see the beginnings of a nest forming, keep an eye on it from day to day. if it grows, it’s an active nest.

You can learn more about the sounds wasps make and how to identify them here!

If you find a nest early enough, you may be able to get rid of it before it becomes unmanageable. Take a look at our guide on getting rid of a wasp nest without getting stung for information on removing wasp nests safely.

Signs Of A Wasp Nest

There are several signs that you can watch for to determine if a nest is nearby. The most common signs to watch for include:

A continuous buzzing noise
Swarming wasps
Tubular mud structures on your home or other structures
A noticeable nest
A flight path back to a nest

Wasps hunt and prey on smaller insects, which can be beneficial if you don’t want these insects eating your garden.

What Kind of Wasps Build Nests In The Spring?

North America is home to thousands of wasp species. Since different species have different hibernating patterns, it’s important to understand what type of wasp you might be dealing with.

Although there are thousands of species, only about 50 of them are stinging wasps. These species are further classified as either solitary or social.

Telling the difference between a beneficial bee and a wasp can be difficult. If you’d like a general breakdown, take a look at our piece on the main honey bee and wasp differences here.

Social wasps

Some of the most common social wasps that people encounter include:

Hornets
Yellowjackets
Umbrella Wasps
Paper Wasps

Social wasps live in multigenerational colonies and have one egg-laying queen. Eggs grow to become either fertile males or sterile females.

In autumn, when temperatures drop, the colony will abandon the nest it has worked so hard to create. The fertile males will leave and search for a mateable queen.

The queen will embark on a mating flight, where she’ll find drones to mate with before finding a safe place to hibernate for the winter.

Social wasps only use a nest once, and they abandon this nest in the fall. When nests are first forming in the spring, wasp spray like Raid Max Foaming Wasp & Hornet Killer is an effective option.

Solitary Wasps

The other type of stinging wasp is the solitary wasp. Examples of solitary wasps include:

Cicada Killer Wasp
Mud Daubers
Digger Wasps
Thread Waisted Wasps
Spider Hawk Wasp
Sand Wasps

Solitary wasps live by themselves in holes they create in mud, wood, or the ground. Where you’ll find a solitary wasp will depend on what type of species it is.

For example, mud daubers build their nests from clay or mud, while cicada killer wasps build their homes underground.

Unlike social wasps, solitary wasps don’t look after their young. After laying her eggs and providing the future larvae with a food source, the queen abandons the nest.

Solitary wasps live alone and build nests for their offspring, who will abandon the nest once they have matured.

How To Tell What Kind Of Wasp Is In Your Yard This Spring

It’s easy to spot a wasp—just look for the person running from it! Jokes aside, since different species of wasps nest in different locations, being able to identify what type of wasp you’re running from will be important if you want to find the nest.

Yellowjackets, hornets, and paper wasps are some of the most common wasps a homeowner will find in their yard. You can identify them by their color, size, personality, and nests.

Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets are very common around picnics, especially garbage cans and sugary drinks. They have the following distinguishing characteristics

Yellow and black
Small, typically 1/2-inch (queens can be 3/4-inch)
Aggressive, especially in the fall
Nests are usually underground, but can be in tree stumps or wall voids.

Paper Wasps

Paper wasps are less aggressive than yellowjackets and are identifiable by their slender waist. Paper wasps are often considered the ‘classic’ wasp.

1/2 to 1 inch long
Slender waist
Typically brown, reddish, or black with yellow or red markings
Nests are grey or brown and have exposed hexagonal cells.

Bald-Faced Hornet

These large and aggressive hornets are one of the worst species to have on your property. Identifying nests early in the spring is ideal.

Mostly black with a white face
Very aggressive and territorial
1/2 to 5/8-inch long
Nests are large, grey, papery nests often built on structures or up in trees.

Mud Daubers

Mud daubers may look mean, but they’re solitary, non-aggressive wasps that are more likely to leave you alone.

Narrow waist
May appear black or metallic blue
Not aggressive
Nests are tubular pipes often plastered on the side of houses

European Hornet

These large social wasps may invade your yard in the spring. While they’re not inherently aggressive, they will defend their nest!

Typically 1 inch long
Reddish brown head with a yellow abdomen
Not usually aggressive unless their nest is disturbed
Nests are papery and typically located in dark cavities like barns, sheds, and attics

Cicada Killers

Cicada killers are one of the largest wasps commonly found around homes, but luckily, they are solitary and rarely aggressive.

Usually 1.5 to 2 inches long
Reddish brown head with a dark abdomen with yellow markings
Not aggressive
Nests are usually underground in well-drained soil in sunny locations.

Knowing exactly what type of wasp is invading your yard this spring is one of the first steps to keeping them out. When you know what kind of wasp it is (solitary, ground-nesting, etc), you can start implementing deterrent tactics to prevent them from building a nest on your property.

That’s A Wrap!

Since wasps aren’t built to withstand cold temperatures, most wasps will perish during the winter months.

The ones who survive (typically queens) do so because they find a place to hibernate. Even then, a vast majority of hibernating queens won’t make it through the winter.

Knowing where the small insects might try to hibernate is important because it can help you eliminate these areas from your home and reduce the chances of finding wasp nests on your property next spring.

Happy wasp repelling!

References:

Kafer, H., Kovac, H., & Stabentheiner, A. (2012). Resting metabolism and critical thermal maxima of vespine wasps (Vespula sp..). Journal of Insect Physiology, 58(5), 679-689.

Montagna, T. S., Torres, V. O., Fernandes, W. D., & Antonialli-Junior, W. F. (2010). Nest Architecture, colony productivity, and duration of immature stages in a social wasp, mischocyttarus consimilis. Journal of Insect Science, 10(191), 1-12.

Sheehan, M. J., & Tibbetts, E. A. (2008). Robust long-term social memories in a paper wasp. Current Biology, 18(18), R851-R852.