How Long Do Wasps Live? A Guide to the Lifespan of Wasps

Wasps are a group of insects with social behavior and belong to the holometabolous animals. In their lifetime they go through four stages: egg, larva, pupa, and adult. They are found in the forests of the mountainous regions of southern China. Compared with humans, the life of a wasp is very short. Let us now take a look at how long wasps live!

How long do wasps live?

The lifespan of a wasp depends on the quality of its living environment. Under normal circumstances, apart from the queen (female wasp), the longest lifespan can reach 120 days, while the shortest is only 45 days.

The reproductive pattern of wasps

After the last frost of the following spring, the queen begins building a nest and laying eggs from late April. Her wings are well developed. After the larvae hatch, they are fed by the queen, then pupate and emerge as adults, becoming the first batch of worker wasps. After that, the queen devotes herself entirely to laying eggs, while the workers build the nest and feed the young larvae. A single queen can produce several thousand to tens of thousands of wasps. In autumn, new queens are produced inside the nest, and the old queen then dies.

The breeding habits of wasps

Wasps spend their whole lives building nests and living in them. Within a colony there are differences between the queen (the female wasp), the workers (female wasps), and the males. The queen is a female wasp that mated and was fertilized by a male the previous autumn; they store the sperm in a spermatheca and use it a bit at a time when mating. Males die shortly after mating. As the weather gradually turns cold, the fertilized females leave the nest one after another to seek shelter from the wind in wall cracks, haystacks, and similar places, huddling together to overwinter.

In the spring of the following year, the surviving females disperse from the cluster and go their separate ways, each finding a suitable place to build a nest and lay eggs. The fertilized eggs they lay develop into females, while the unfertilized eggs develop into males. As the number of workers increases, the nest gradually expands. The workers are responsible for building the nest and rearing the larvae. In central China there are 3 peak occurrences each year. After autumn, males make up about 1/3 of the total in the nest, which is the period with the most males in the year.