These yellow and black wasps are social insects and live in underground nests of up to around 10,000 workers.

Statistics
The common wasp grows up to 19mm long.

Physical description
It has a yellow head with a black top, a black thorax with yellow on its sides, a yellow abdomen with black bands, black antennae and yellow legs.

Distribution
These insects are common throughout Europe.

Habitat
Wasps are found in gardens, woodland and meadows.

Diet
They are omnivorous, feeding on fallen fruit, nectar and carrion, but mostly catching other insects. Common wasps will also attempt to invade honey bee nests to steal their honey.

Behaviour
Common wasps are social insects and live in nests of up to around 10,000 workers. They build a paper nest in a hole in the ground. The paper is made by the wasps who chew small amounts of wood from trees, reeds or garden fences and mix it with saliva to form a pulp which is added to the nest in thin strips. The wasps do not construct their own burrow but will choose one which already exists such as an abandoned animal burrow, a garden shed, or the loft of a house.

Workers forage and feed larvae, and cool the nest with water and fanning. Workers will aggressively defend the nest by stinging anything causing a disturbance. Unlike bees, wasps are able to sting repeatedly. The venom of the wasp contains a pheromone which acts as an alarm causing other wasps to become more aggressive when a wasp has stung something or has been killed. So it is a bad idea to swat a wasp near its nest site or to attempt to remove the nest yourself.

Reproduction
Common wasps do not have a mating flight like ants do. Mating takes place between young queens and drones in the vicinity of the nest. At the end of autumn the nest dies and the only wasps left alive are the young mated queens. They fly away and find a safe place to hibernate for the winter. It is not uncommon to discover a hibernating queen in the folds of curtains in houses.

Within each of the hibernating queen wasps is a tightly packed ball of dormant sperm stored from mating the previous summer. She is able to release newly activated sperm each time she lays an egg without the need for repeated matings. Therefore, each dormant queen literally has the potential to form a new colony.

In late spring the queen will emerge from hibernation and begin searching for a suitable nest site. When she has found one she starts building a small paper nest into which she begins to lay eggs. The eggs hatch out into sterile females called workers. These workers then take over the job of nest building and larvae feeding and the queen continues to lay eggs.

Towards the end of the summer the queen lays some more eggs which produce male wasps, called drones, and fertile females which will be the queens of next year's nests. These swarm out of the colony and mate. The males die shortly afterwards.

Conservation status
They are not listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.