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Yellow Jackets
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. Yellow jackets are sometimes mistakenly called "bees", as they are similar in size and appearance and both sting, but they are actually wasps. Yellow jackets may be confused with other wasps, such as hornets and paper wasps. A typical yellow jacket worker is about 12 mm (0.5 in) long, with alternating bands on the abdomen; the queen is larger, about 19 mm (0.75 in) long. Workers are sometimes confused with honey bees, especially when flying in and out of their nests. Yellow jackets, in contrast to honey bees, are not covered with tan-brown dense hair on their bodies, they do not carry pollen, and do not have the flattened hairy hind legs used to carry it.
These species have lance-like stingers with small barbs, and typically sting repeatedly,[though occasionally a stinger becomes lodged and pulls free of the wasp's body; . All species have yellow or white on their faces. The mouth parts are well-developed with strong mandibles for capturing and chewing insects, with probosces for sucking nectar, fruit, and other juices. Yellow jackets build nests in trees, shrubs, or in protected places such as inside man-made structures, or in soil cavities, mouse burrows, etc. They build them from wood fiber they chew into a paper-like pulp
Yellow jackets are social hunters living in colonies containing workers, queens, and males. Fertilized queens are found in protected places such as hollow logs, in stumps, under bark, in leaf litter, in soil cavities, and man-made structures. Queens overwinter and emerge during the warm days of late spring or early summer, select a nest site, and build a small paper nest in which they lay eggs. After eggs hatch from the 30 to 50 brood cells.
Adults feed primarily on items rich in sugars and carbohydrates, such as fruits, flower nectar, and tree sap, and larvae feed on proteins, such as insects, meats, and fish. . In late summer, foraging workers change their food preference from meats to ripe, decaying fruits, or scavenge human garbage, sodas, picnics, etc.,
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From the time of emerging until her death in the autumn, the queen remains inside the nest, laying eggs. The colony then expands rapidly, reaching a maximum size of 4,000 to 5,000 workers and a nest of 10,000 to 15,000 cells in late summer. New queens build up fat reserves to overwinter..