Professional Hornet Removal

Habitat

The largest populations of hornets live in tropical Asia. However, hornets have made their way to Africa, Europe, and North America, including Colorado. They often make their nests in bushes or trees. However, they also frequently build their nests on the side of a building.

Hornets build their nests by chewing up wood to make a paper-like, football-shaped nest. The nest has an opening at the bottom so that the hornets can come and go. If you looked inside an active hornets’ nest, you might find hundreds of these insects. What’s more, they will aggressively attack if you disturb them.

Life Cycle

The lifecycle of a grist of hornets goes through several phases. First, a fertilized queen hornet begins the solo task of building her hive in the spring. After the queen partially completes the nest, she lays eggs in each of its cells. Then, five to eight days later, the eggs hatch, and the queen feeds and cares for them through five stages of growth and metamorphosis.

At first, asexual females make up most of the hive, and these take over all the tasks the queen did when she was alone, including foraging, maintaining the nest, and caring for the young. The queen still lays the eggs does little else once the worker hornets take over the other tasks. Male hornets are few, and they really only have one job – mating during a mating flight. After they mate with the queen, they typically die almost immediately. Later, the queen begins producing fertile females that add to the colony.

As omnivores, hornets eat both plant and animal matters, often munching on their relatives, the yellowjackets. They live for several months, but they do not survive the winter. That is, the hornets other than the queen die. But the queen lives through the winter to begin anew in the spring.