Yellow jackets stand out from other wasps with their lifestyle. They build large colonies and huge nests in trees and the ground. Yellow jackets are partial predators, so they eat insects, so the question arises if they do eat each other too?
Yellow jackets can eat each other, as they are carnivorous and eat insects. However, they prefer a variety of other prey to feed their offspring. A cannibalistic behavior can take place, but is rare and usually provoked by extreme hunger and lack of food.
Yellow jackets form a colony that consists of the queen and the workers. The queen lays eggs, while the workers are protecting her and bringing in the food for her and the larvae. The offspring needs a protein-rich diet to evolve so the workers are hunting for prey all the time.
What do yellow jackets eat?
The difference between yellow jackets and other species of wasps, like hornets, bees, or any other wasps, is their higher level of aggressiveness and different habits. Yellow jackets can sting at the slightest provocations, to defend their colony.
Yellow jackets do have a feeding behavior that is often misunderstood because they are mostly observed eating on our sugary drinks and food.
Mostly, the diet of yellow jackets consists of plant juice and nectar.
They have little straw that helps them to suck juices from plants. Yellow jackets also love sweet drinks and candy. They can sometimes steal honey from the honey bees.
So basically yellow jackets love everything with sugar. Another interesting fact about yellow jackets is that they need proteins during the larval stage.
The worker wasps bring little insects and other types of meat to the nest so that larvae can eat and grow.
Especially in the summer the yellow jackets need a great amount of food to feed their huge colony. The worker wasps are hunting on prey all day long and bringing it into the nest.
This diet makes yellow jackets an important part of garden pest control, even though many people consider yellow jackets a vermin. They eat a lot of harmful pests and keep their numbers low.
What is the prey of yellow jackets?
Yellow jackets feed on insects like flies and bees. They also eat spiders and caterpillars.
As mentioned above yellow jackets build their nests underground, which opens a lot of opportunities for them to get around garbage. They like human food, such as sweets and different meats. Yellow jackets will search their food for about 1 mile from their nest.
Yellow jackets are also known for stealing honey from beehives. They eat not only honey but the bees as well. They can attack honey bees and even destroy the entire honeybee colony.
As you can see other wasps are not the primary prey for yellow jackets. Nevertheless it can occur that they do hunt or fight with them.
Why do yellow jackets fight each other?
Yellow jackets might start fighting each other to defend their colony. Wasps have great abilities to sense chemical signals, which help them to identify their mates from the colony from other unknown wasps. So when they see unfamiliar wasps, they may start defending their nest through fighting.
Wasps are territorial and when it comes to defending their nests, they are extremely aggressive and they will viciously defend their nest from danger. This is the case for social wasps, such as hornets and yellow jackets. They will create a swarm and attack together anything they think is a potential threat.
Wasps defend their territory.
During the fall after the queen stops laying eggs, and there are no larvae to feed. It starts to get harder to find sources of food, which leads to starvation. Hunger makes yellow jackets curios and more aggressive. This can also be the reason they fight each other.
Starving wasps are more aggressive.
Some hungry yellow jackets can target honey beehives, and eat bees and their larvae, as well as honey. Honey bees are sensitive to cold temperatures. Cold weather makes them slower and unenergetic. Yellow jackets use that and successfully attack honey bees.
Yellow jackets can tolerate lower temperatures than many other bees, that’s why you can notice them in the late fall. But closer to the winter yellow jackets start dying, except for the queen. It remains underground to start a new colony in spring.
Why do yellow jackets eat each other?
They eat each other under certain circumstances. As mentioned above, when when the sources of food are depleted (or unavailable due to extreme weather), yellow jackets are highly aggressive.
They feel hunger, which pushes them to unusual behavior, like attacking other wasps. They do it to not starve to death.
Also, if yellow jackets of one colony see the potential threat from a wasp, which comes from another colony, it’s most likely they will kill and eat it. Yellow jackets can sense the danger. Yellow jackets are predatory insects, making them dangerous for other insects.
Wasps can easily hunt other insects, sting them several times to paralyze them, and then they just eat that insect.
Are yellow jackets cannibals?
Cannibalism is a phenomenon when one insect eats the flesh of its own kind. Yellow jackets can be considered cannibals because they can eat each other in certain situations. Wasps can be both cannibals and carnivores, as first of all, they are predators.
They are not very choosy about the meat they eat. That’s why when hard periods of starvation come, they can start eating each other. Some scientists have noted their observations of the cannibalistic behavior of wasps and held some experiments to see what meats wasps can eat.
The earliest observation of cannibalism of wasps was noted in 1884 by a correspondent of the Nature journal. This shows that this behavior was present back in the XIX century as well.
Mostly, yellow jackets choose to eat each other in situations, where they want to survive and not starve to death. This behavior is not common, but considering that yellow jackets are predators and eat insects, we may expect cases of cannibalism among them.
