Bees were my nemesis when I was growing up. In a bad summer week I might get stung twice; during a good period I could go a couple months without being hit. I’m sure I never went a whole summer sting free, for our house in rural Indiana was purest heaven for bees and wasps. The rough wooden eaves in the barn provided a home for thousands of paper wasps and mud daubers. Bumblebees loved the zinnias in the front row of the garden so much they slept on the petals each night. Billions of white clover flowers dominated the lawn, where feasting honeybees grew fat as cows.
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That is, until September rolls around. In the late summer and early fall yellow jackets rule Chicago’s streets and parks like tiny thugs. They lie thick on fallen hawthorn berries squashed on sidewalks. Any open garbage bin will have a half dozen buzzing about. They menace small children, forcing them to drop their Popsicles and run for cover. They intimidate adults by swarming wineglasses at outdoor parties, landing on cups of Coke at ball games, and dive-bombing tuna sandwiches during lunch.
While yellow jackets are around all summer, they are most abundant and obvious now. In spring the only yellow jackets alive are queens who were fertilized the previous fall. In the first warm weather of April or May they leave their winter shelters to build nests. A queen will spend the first part of the summer producing sterile female workers who take care of her and the larvae. While the first workers born live only two weeks, those hatched in August have longer life spans, of 22 days. By August new queens and fertile males also begin to be produced, building the population of yellow jackets gradually to its September peak.
Ron Panzer, a biologist at Northeastern Illinois University, describes this time as the workers’ hedonistic phase. He says yellow jackets are in our faces because “they’re trying to find one perfect piece of ice cream before they die.”
In the yellow jackets’ defense, not all the numerous species of this insect are scavengers that live uncomfortably close to humans. Hating all yellow jackets because of the unattractive behavior of the Vespula vulgaris group would be like detesting every species of bird because you don’t like pigeons. There’s an entire branch of the yellow-jacket family that wouldn’t deign to touch you or your sorbet. They live on other insects and nectar from flowers. Even the scavenger species consume large quantities of flies, caterpillars, spiders, and other bees. If we were to eliminate all yellow jackets it would likely increase the populations of these other insects.
