Social Wasps (Vespinae) in Urban Gardens and Woods

Abstract

Global change, including urbanization, affects species ecology. Social wasps (Vespinae) are ubiquitous in urban areas, which increases their encounters with humans. We studied social wasps in urban gardens and nearby urban woods in central Finland, using beer traps. Social wasps were common in gardens and woods, and overall wasp abundance was higher in the woods. Also, the most abundant and frequent species Vespula vulgaris was more abundant in the woods than in the gardens. Variation in the overall abundance and the abundance of V. vulgaris was great among trap locations, which likely results from wasps' social nesting habits. Neither the abundance of all social wasps nor that of V. vulgaris differed between July and August. Our study suggests that urban woods might increase wasp abundance in adjacent gardens. Vespula germanica -a species expanding its range northwards in Finland -was documented for the first time from central Finland. The ongoing global change is likely to change wasp communities and their encounters with humans in urban environments.

Social structure of perennialVespula squamosawasp colonies

“…Additionally, they become much more of a human nuisance because they contain orders of magnitude more workers than a typical nest (Beggs et al, 2011 ; Lester & Beggs, 2019 ; Wilson & Holway, 2010 ; Wilson et al, 2009 ). Vespula perennial colonies are expected to increase their range in response to climate change, which will further increase negative interactions with humans (Demain, 2020 ; Komonen et al, 2020 ; Lester et al, 2017 ). Moreover, it has been found that relatively few Vespula wasps are needed to initiate a new introduced population (Brenton‐Rule et al, 2018 ; Chau et al, 2015 ; Dobelmann et al, 2019 ; Eloff et al, 2020 ; Hanna et al, 2014 ; Schmack et al, 2019 ).…”

Developing response-ability in human-wasp encounters

“…Global environmental changes, including climate change, affect the behavior, range, and abundance of wasps. For instance, the German wasp, Vespula germanica, native to central and southern Europe, has expanded its range north to Finland (Sorvari 2018;Komonen et al 2020). In Finland, several exceptionally hot and long summers in the 2010s facilitated wasp communities to grow large.…”

“…While we aimed for a genuinely interdisciplinary research narrative, the different sub-studies and datasets are in different roles in the paper. Results from the ecological research have already been published in Komonen et al (2020), Komonen and Torniainen (2022), and Torniainen and Komonen (2021), and here they are referred to as secondary material. We also refer anecdotally to unpublished work, including questionnaires for high-school and university students, material obtained from a citizen science survey, and observations from collaboration with a pest management company 1 .…”

“…Both species have been expanding their range northwards over the past few decades, presumably due to global warming (Jantunen and Saarinen 2007;Sorvari 2018). Our study recorded the German wasp from central Finland for the first time (Komonen et al 2020). The availability of nest sites largely determines the smallscale distribution of wasps in an area.…”

“…For example, the German wasp seems particularly common in urban areas (Sorvari 2018), which increases the likelihood of human-wasp encounters, especially as the species' range expansion continues. Furthermore, flexibility in wasps' choice of nesting sites is manifested in the fact that diverse wasp communities occur in urban areas (Moller et al 1991;Nadolski 2012;Komonen et al 2020).…”