I was telling one of my colleagues at work yesterday about wasps, and by strange coincidence, there was a feature on wasps today the BBC website relating much the same account.
Anyway, you may have noticed that wasps are generally not a nuisance in the early spring but come the autumn, they are all over the picnic tables, barbecues and cans of coke and beer, etc. There is a reason for this according to my beekeeping book (section on bee evolution) that I was reading at the weekend.
Like bees, wasps live in colonies, and like bees, the female worker wasps, tend and feed the young larva. Unlike bee larva, however, young wasp larva are carnivorous, and the adult workers bring them food such as caterpillars, aphids, grubs, etc. In return, the larva, excrete a sweet, sticky substance that in turn feeds the worker wasps and encourages them to go off hunting again, get rewarded again, and so it goes on. Unlike a bee colony, which works together to store food for colony in order to to survive the winter, only the queen wasps survive the winter. As a result, come the autumn, less larva are raised, and hence the worker wasps become somewhat redundant. Worse still they are not getting their sweet 'fix' from the brood larva and they go in search of anything else that is sweet and sticky, rather than hunting for food for the young. Hence, the nuisance they cause.
All sort of makes sense once you understand the cycle of wasp life.
The BBC website has had a few problems lately, so if I can find the article I will post a link later.