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Saturday, November 5, 2011

Life of paper wasps

Like other social wasps paper wasps lead a social life. But unlike others, paper wasps community don't have any queen, drone or worker classification. All the members in a nest are involved in food gathering, nest building, and producing and rearing young. Generally about 200 paper wasps live together in a nest.

Paper wasps have a life-cycle which has four stages:
1. egg,
2. larvae,
3. pupa,
4. and adult.
This is called "complete metamorphosis". The entire process from egg to adult takes several weeks to finish.

In spring paper wasps start building their nests. The fertile females lay some eggs in cells and hatch into legless grub-like larvae. The females look after the larvae and gradually after several stages they become the adults and the basis of the nest.

In autumn the colony begins to die out and only a few young females survive to carry on next season. These females hibernate through winter and emerge in spring to build a small nest that forms the basis of a new colony. 

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