Wes Johnson|News-Leader
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Veteran beekeeper Michael Meyer peers into the top of his beehive and admires the gaggle of inch-long queens being tended to by their drones.
But the tenants of this particular hive are not bees. They are yellow jackets wasps.
"Peoplewho've come out here are seeing an amazing thing, a very rare thing," said Meyer. "Very few people have actually seen a yellow jacket queen while it's still in the hive."
Meyer won't be driving his 1995 Ford flatbed truck with 348,000 miles on it anytime soon. Vibrations from just turning onthe engine likely wouldcause a torrent of angry yellow jackets to spill out of the hive sitting on the truck bed.
Yellow jacketvenom packs a wallop, and they are known to bite hard to gain a better hold before plunging their stingers repeatedly into avictim.
Meyer knows the risks butdoesn't mind.The hive is an experiment,a rare chance to witness the inner workings of a yellow jacket colony that has grown to more than 700 insects in just a few months. His experiment will soon come to an end, when the first frost chills Springfield.
Meyer first noticed that yellow jackets had taken over the bee hive in early June.As an experiment, he fashioned a glass top for the hive that lets him peer inside in relative safety.
Relative, as in he's been stung by aggressive yellow jackets only 10 times since first noticing the nest.
"The queens are much bigger than a typical yellow jacket, three times longer and maybe 10 times bigger in mass," he said."We're going to gain an understandingof when yellow jackets can be peskyto humans.And if they are pesky, what countermeasures humans can do to neutralize that besides killing them.They do a tremendous amount of good all summer long in the gardens. They get rid of caterpillars."
After catching caterpillars, the yellow jackets bring them back to the hive where they are fed to baby yellow jackets.But as fall arrives, the wasps switch to eating sugar-laden foods and some focus on mating with the queens to perpetuate the hive.
Meyer said the fertilized queens will fly away and find a place to hibernate over winter before starting a new colony in late spring.
Most yellow jackets build colonies underground, though their paper-like nests can also be found in dead trees.
Of 50 queens that might exit a colony, only two or three might survive to lay eggs next year, he said. Unlike honeybees, where hundreds might fly with their queen to establish a new hive, Meyer said all the drones and worker yellow jackets will die with the onset of freezing weather.
"It's up to those queens that survive to propagate the next generation of yellow jackets," he said.
Especially in late summer and fall, Meyer cautioned that yellow jackets are drawn to sugary sodas and juice drinks left out in the open.
"It has happened before that someone takes a drink and swallows a yellow jacket, which can be life-threatening if it stings their throat andtheir throat starts to swell," he said.
He believes the more people know about yellow jackets, the better off both will be.
