Hornets' and Bees' Nests

     A few days ago I saw two bald-faced hornet nests, one hanging from a low tree limb over a rural road in a small woodlot and the other on a low branch on a young tree in a meadow, both in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania farmland.  Each hornets' nest was about the size of a basketball, but oblong, was mottled-gray, and had an entrance on the side close to the bottom.  Several female worker hornets were buzzing in or out of the entrance, while others were adding "paper" to the outside of their larvae nursery.
     Bald-faced hornets and honey bees are colonial-nesting insects in the same family.  Female workers of both species create large nurseries to raise larvae during the warmer months each year.  Those females work all day, every day of their adult lives, and swarms of them will sting invaders of their homes.  The queens of each species involve themselves only with egg-laying.
     Worker hornets make nurseries, and the six-sided cells inside each one, by scraping dead wood with their mouths from trees and fences, mixing saliva with that pulp while they chew it into paper, then add that paper to their nest.  Each nest is tiny in the beginning of summer, worked on by the queen and her first few workers, her daughters.  But paper is constantly added to the nursery shell, and its cells, as the hornet population grows, until that construction is much larger by autumn.
     The queen lays an egg in each nursery cell and the young are protected from weather and predators by the papery shell surrounding the cluster of cells in each hornets' nest.  Worker hornets sip sugary flower nectar, but they feed paralyzed insects to the larvae in their cells.  Each youngster grows in its six-sided nursery, pupates in it and emerges from it as an adult hornet ready to do the work of its community.  The emptied cell is then cleaned by workers and another egg is laid in it. 
     Frost in October kills the worker and male hornets, but the queen and her new, young queens that hatched in her paper ball, drop out of the nursery and burrow deep into the ground to survive the coming winter.  By mid-December that paper construction should be safe to collect, if one wants to.  The hornets will never use it again.
     In North America, we see most honey bee colonies in built bee hives, but some communities of that species live in tree hollows, in woods and older suburban areas.  When a new queen bee emerges from her pupal cell, the old queen leaves the hive with about half the workers and starts a new colony in another sheltered place, often in a tree cavity.  Workers make waxy, six-sided cells by "sweating" honey through their bodies and scraping it off.  Those cells are used either to store honey or raise young.  The bee larvae are fed a mixture of honey and flower pollen.  Each grows in its cell, pupates in it and emerges as an adult female worker ready to do the work of her colony.  Unfertilized eggs, however, develop into drones (males).
     Young worker bees clean the hive, store honey in cells, feed larvae, fan air into the hive with their wings to cool it, and feed the drones and the queen.  Older workers gather nectar and pollen from flowers and turn the nectar into honey on their way home in a hive or tree hollow.
     I have seen wild honey bee colonies in tree cavities in such far-flung places as here in Lancaster County, and in Charlotte, North Carolina and Savannah, Georgia.  There probably are wild honey bees throughout much of the United States.  They just aren't always noticed.
     Hornets' nests and wild honey bee communities help make the outdoors more interesting.  And those colonial insects are instrumental in pollinating flowers, including those of our crops.