I learned the difference between yellowjacket wasps (not desirable) and paper wasps (desirable): The paper wasps have yellow antennae!

I’ve also learned that wasps hunt for beetles and other garden pests, and are generally not hostile — only if attacked. Some wasps burrow in the ground and take out June beetles — I would love to have some of those wasps around.

Yellow jacket wasps are the most aggressive, from what I have read — they seem to be lured to sweet fruits, so once I get my mini-orchard going, I should take care to clean up fallen fruits.

Overall — wasps are great for gardens. Not at all what I had thought, living in the city. I’m starting to see a good variety of wasps in the garden, which I hope becomes a trend. There are beetles hiding out in the foliage that I would like eliminated.

My cat had an encounter a few weeks ago with a wasp, and got stung. I wonder if wasps have not been active back there because of the cat. We’ll see.

Learning about wasps: free pest control by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International