Normally I stay as far away from large hornets’ nests as I can. But this large weather-worn nest that I encountered on Saturday was uninhabited, which allowed me to examine it more closely than I could have during the summer when it would’ve been occupied by as many as 300 stinging residents. Overall, this nest was roughly basketball sized, and consisted of layers of paper-mache textured sheets surrounding an inner network of hexagonal cells. Although the nest appears grey at first glance, closer inspection revealed that the outer papery covering was constructed of various strips of material in different shades of grey and tan. 

The construction of a nest like this begins in the spring with a baldfaced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) queen who has overwintered in a sheltered location. The queen gathers cellulose from rotting wood with her mouth and mixes it with her saliva to make a paste from which to construct the nest, typically attaching it to the end of a branch of a tree or a shrub. I imagine that those slightly different colored stripes in the nest material are due to the original cellulose material being sourced from multiple different pieces of wood (but I couldn’t find any detailed sources to confirm this). At the onset, she creates a small nest with only a few brood cells (the hexagonal shapes in the interior portion of the nest) and deposits eggs in each of them. Once grown, this initial brood will take over the nest building duties, as well as the other tasks of food collection, feeding the additional larvae the queen with lay and protecting the nest.

Baldfaced hornets resemble their close relative, the common yellowjacket, in shape, but have much more black on their bodies, with the alternating color being closer to white than yellow. In fact, bald faced hornets are actually a type of “aerial yellowjacket”, and not a true “hornet” at all.