0:00

It is May. Among springtime developments ... the least welcome, perhaps, is already underway. This female yellow jacket is trying to build a nest. Success will mean some 500 of her children will serve her -- and the complex community she founds -- until fall.

0:25

But a yellow jacket queen rarely makes it past this stage. She must gather wood pulp to build the nest, lay eggs, kill prey to feed her larvae. She must survive until she has raised the four to seven workers necessary to keep an infant nest alive. It is usually too much. As in this case, the queen disappears, leaving a tiny shell of a nest behind.

0:59

Of course, the occasional success story is the very symbol of summertime hazards. For perhaps two million Americans, a yellow jacket sting can mean death. Immunizing even a fraction of those allergic to yellow jacket venom may cost a hundred million dollars annually. Pharmaceutical companies need yellow jacket venom for a vaccine against the sting. And so, for Jim DiGiulio of Corvallis, summer is yellow jacket harvest time.

1:33

"I'm hoping for 400 workers out of this. That would be about right for that sized nest. There's some unspoken word going out, 'cause the others will come quite quickly and before you know it, you'll have a cloud of them around you. I don't think I would be standing there that long if I was not suited up."

1:57

Scientists like Jim think yellow jackets deserve respect for more than just the threat they pose to humans. The little wasps are insect-killing machines. Their powerful mandibles butcher countless flies and other pests as protein for larvae produced by the queen. Like their cousins the honeybee, workers divide their labor. While some hunt, others clean the hive or apply chewed wood fiber in a continuous nest construction project. Some guard the nest.

2:28

"They have extremely good vision. And I think those are ones that are just sort of curious about what's going on. And they're sort of oriented towards you. And if the threat gets any worse, adios."

2:43

Unlike a beehive, the yellow jacket nest will rarely, if ever, survive the winter in the Pacific Northwest. The insects don't waste energy storing food. Fresh insect parts nourish the larvae, which reside in layers of cells underneath the skin of the nest.

3:02

"The larvae are oriented so that their heads are hanging down. All of these cells are arranged so that they're like bats in a cave. They're hanging upside down, so what's presented to us are the heads of the larvae. Their mandibles are much, much smaller than the mandibles of the adults, but they work. And since the adults have prechewed a lot of the material they've brought in, the larvae are able to handle it."

3:32

But the yellow jacket nursery isn't necessarily the comfortable place for larvae it might seem to be. In autumn, when food is scarce, workers feed some larvae to their siblings. As summer moves on, the yellow jacket faces hotter, drier weather and a dwindling supply of insects. And by late July the yellow jacket itself is a prey item. The hornet finds the yellow jacket delicious.

4:00

"The much larger hornet has the size advantage and so it will physically overpower the yellow jacket. The battle will continue until the head is bitten off. That's pretty much the end of the battle."

4:15

Though a yellow jacket butchers its prey to reduce the prey's size for flight, the hornet need make no such provision. This hornet has carried a whole caterpillar back to the nest. Maneuvering the load to the entrance, however, apparently taxes the physical and logistical capacity of the powerful creature.

4:38

It is August. And there is a new player on the yellow jacket scene. This hobbit-like hole in a Willamette Valley farm field marks the residence of groundnesting yellow jackets. Hanging nests are fading. From now until late October, groundnesters will be the dominant yellow jacket. These are the creatures that ruin picnics. Unlike their above-ground-dwelling sisters, groundnesters add other protein to their diet of live insects: fried chicken, sandwiches and such.

5:14

"Once one sort of starts getting curious about you, before you know it, they're all over you."

5:21

Groundnesters are fierce. They can attack with little provocation. Jim must be especially wary now.

5:28

"Groundnesters are a real threat. And they're very difficult to handle and I get stung frequently. Not on every nest by any means, not on every other nest. I've had nightmares about yellow jackets and it seems to come every year for a week or so. I kind of find myself waking up a lot during the night."

5:49

Today the bee suit protects Jim without incident. Soon the collection jar is filled with hundreds of yellow jackets sucked from the nest. The workers attack his thick gloves and find themselves hooked by their own stingers. They pull free. But the pulsing stinger stays behind.

6:12

Jim will destroy the nest -- digging it out level by level to collect the queen. Most workers will soon be captured, too. They continue to try to enter their non-existent nest by its entrance where the vacuum cleaner nozzle waits.

6:27

"And there's the queen! Look at that -- see that?"

6:32

Jim DiGiulio may take more than half-a-million yellow jackets and hornets in a season. But he will have little impact on the total numbers of the insects. He will have gathered 100 pounds of the wasps to help produce sting desensitization vaccine. But they will still be around to control insect pests.

6:52

"A lot of what they're growing up on is other insect tissue and so they're eating many times their weight in bugs to become an adult. I don't know how many flies makes a yellow jacket, but it's quite a few."