woofie said:Interesting. I've never been stung by a paper wasp, and we have them here in abundance! And every year it's a battle over who gets to use the greenhouse, me or them. The level of aggression described sounds more like the yellowjackets we have here. They are nasty critters and very aggressive! Could you be dealing with yellowjackets (which are actually hornets, not wasps) rather than paper wasps?
The stings are painful. Here we have four common wasps. I think they are all probably Polistes but I know them by the common names I heard while growing up. The 'red wasp', the 'black wasp' which is really a red black color and makes really huge paper nests, and the 'big yellow jacket' and the 'little yellow jacket'. This last is the one I eliminated. The others are larger wasps and, compared to the smaller one, fairly laid back. I've been stung by them all. The small one and the red wasp have the most painful stings, followed by the 'large yellow jacket' with the least painful being the blackish one. Unfortunately the small one is by far the most aggressive. They tend to have smaller paper nests tucked in obscure spots where they are hard to detect. That has resulted in my being stung by them far more than the other three types. I'm pretty sure the two called 'yellow jackets' are not that at all, but paper wasps. They just have yellow and black coloration. There are a couple of more exotic types of paper wasp, but they aren't common and don't construct their housing developments around human dwellings. If they aren't in a location where a human is apt to disturb them, I consider them beneficial. Excessively hot temperatures seems to make them more aggressive for some reason.
