How Big is a Queen Wasp? And where to see them

Queen wasps are bigger than males, and some species produce sterile daughters who work as nannies for their siblings. Some wasps are solitary, others semi-solitary, and others breed in colonies. Queen wasps can be seen in parks, gardens, bushland or your backyard building nests or tending to their young.  

When people hear the word “wasp”, they probably think of the hyper-aggressive invader, the European wasp (Vespula germanica), which has spoiled many a Sunday barbecue. However, Australia has 12,000 wasp species, and a few are introduced, so they’re not native.

Also, Australia has 35 native paper wasps and hundreds of species of tiny parasitic wasps, many playing a vital role in controlling plant pests.

The Wasp Queen’s Modus Operandi

In many wasp species, the wasp that begins a nest becomes the queen and has earned the right to be the only individual to lay her eggs there. Some native wasps build their nests of mud, but paper wasps build paper palaces made from minute shavings of rotten wood and saliva. 

The queen expertly shapes the paper plaster into cells and lays an egg in each one where it hatches into a grub or larvae, becomes a pupa and then emerges as an adult wasp. 

Queen Wasps Come in All Shapes and Sizes

Wasps can have narrow waists and pointy bellies; they can be metallic blue, brown, yellow or red, and the queen wasp is usually the largest in the colony, much bigger than the female workers and the drones, or males. 

The queen’s sole purpose in life is to lay eggs. Only the queens and female wasps have stingers (but not all wasps do), and these are for self-defence or to defend the colony or nest. Their bright colours are a warning to others of their painful sting.

Since there are some 12,000 different wasp species in Australia of all sizes and habits, there are 12,000 various queens. Some colonies have only one queen, and some have one queen with many sterile female workers. 

The queens are the biggest wasps in the colony; the males are drones, and as mentioned, only the females (in the species that have stingers) can sting! However, not all queens are social and breed in colonies. There are solitary, semi-solitary and social wasps in Australia.

Wasp Pests in Australia

While wasps don’t kill people unless they have severe allergic reactions to the sting, most of us tend to avoid them like the plague. And with good reason, since an attack by a swarm of angry stinging wasps protecting their nest is a shock and can also be very painful.  

Without allergies, you might show only minor symptoms, but a wasp can target you as a threat and emit pheromones that call other members of the colony to help attack you if you threaten a nest.

The European Wasp

The European Wasp, which, as the name suggests, is not native to Australia, is 12mm – 16mm in length, and the queen is about 20mm long, with a bright yellow body and black triangular markings. This wasp is well known to most people for its aggression and painful sting. Unlike bees, wasps don’t die after it stings, so they can jab you multiple times and cause excruciating pain. 

Since it is an exotic pest, any nests must be reported to the government. It has no natural predators here and serves no environmental purpose, unlike Australian native wasps. Most Acacia Pest Control call-outs are for the treatment and removal of European wasps or paper wasp nests in Geelong homes and commercial properties due to both wasp species’ aggression and colonisation practices.