Behold the Bald-Faced Hornet! (Little Green Notebook)

To whom we owe considerable gratitude

Our beautiful present

Now that my engagement and wedding reminiscences have passed, my mind wanders closer to the present. In fact, it wanders just to my right, where a large bald-faced hornet’s nest hangs from a lamp in our living room.

To save face with the entomologists, let me quickly state that bald-faced hornets are a type of yellow jacket, which is a type of wasp. Hereafter, I will toss these terms about casually.

This wasp nest is a thing of beauty, with layers of wasp paper swirled in semicircles like chocolate cake batter, ornamented with twigs and leaves.

It was a gift from our former neighbors, Hunter and Trad, who left it on our porch when they graduated from Auburn University and moved out into the real world.

“How sweet!” I exclaimed when I found the hornet’s nest carefully attached to a hook near the door. I knew right away who left it. We were pleased to be the chosen stewards of this treasure.

Staring at the colorful swirls and patterns in this natural marvel got me to wondering, just how do the hornets build these turbanesque condos? What’s going on inside those wispy, swirled walls?

It all begins with a queen. After incubating through the winter, she’ll emerge from her den, maybe a rock pile or a hole in a log, ready to build her empire. She’ll find a suitable spot for a nest and get to work on the nursery, a “comb” with hexagonal baby beds into which she’ll deposit her fertilized eggs.

The queen will attend to this first batch of little ones herself. Despite these humble beginnings, soon she’ll have hundreds of sterile staff on hand to take on building more combs, collecting insects to feed the wriggling larvae, and constructing the walls of the “cone” which will become the giant paper nest.

The drone hornets will continue building the combs in stacks, hanging them from the original supporting branch like a buzzing chandelier. They’ll add more paper to the cone. The hive and the nest will grow.

Inside the nest, Canva Pro

But how the heck do they make their paper? These crafty wasps begin by scraping pulp from nearby trees or wooden structures, chewing and mixing it with their saliva, then regurgitating the paste while pressing it flat with their mandibles and legs, moving in just the right patterns to make combs for larvae and the protective cones around the combs.

I know this because when I should have been sitting downstairs with Joe having a glass of wine on a Saturday night, I was upstairs watching YouTubes on “The Hornet King” channel, which I recommend. Here’s something I don’t recommend: reading about mouth larvae, which I stumbled upon trying to figure out how bald-faced hornet larvae eat. I typed, “Do larvae have mouths?” I still don’t know.

The glorious paper nest will only be used for one season. As summer peaks, the larvae pupate, and the workers shift their duties from feeding the babies to tending to themselves, feasting on overripe fruits and nectar from late blooming flowers.

Now the queen switches from producing sterile to fertile offspring, who mate in a frenzy to ensure future populations of bald-faced hornets, the overarching drive of life on Earth. Once the males have done their job, they become dizzy with their own success and go goofy, eating to their hearts’ content. They buzz and fly with joyful abandon. I may be anthropomorphizing a touch, but they do display erratic behavior.

And then they die. All but the fertilized females, the new queens, that is, who will leave the paper castle and find a place to bed down for the winter. The nest now awaits curious nature lovers to pluck it down for display in their living room, or hungry birds to rip it apart looking for food.

As for the newly fertilized queens, most won’t survive their winter sleep. Many are eaten by other insects or spiders, and sadly, in these warm winters of late, many will emerge too soon and die of starvation.  

What a saga! Despite their aggressive behavior when guarding a nest, bald-faced hornets are beneficial as pollinators and as a means of pest control, as well as being amazing.

Aren’t insects just a marvel? I’m baffled and awed by the messages encoded in their DNA instructing them to dance maps, paralyze spiders, build mounds, and make paper. We can learn so much from them. Apparently, curious engineers in the Han Dynasty studied wasps and copied their recipe for macerating pulp fibers and rebuilding them into paper, something with a whole ‘nother molecular configuration.

Behold the bald-faced hornets! I still write in a paper notebook, keep a paper calendar, and send paper snail mail. I’m indebted to these remarkable engineers forever.

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