Something unusual happened at waspville the other day

For me, it was just another morning, same routine, get up, cup of tea, a slice of toast, read emails, then check the garden. All was well, and how it was the day before. As I was just about to go back into my house, I glanced up at the bird box I have in the corner of my garden. The one with the wasps nest in it, Ive spoken about it in another post. Well,, today there was something definitely going on out of the ordinary. The entrance to the box was covered in wasps, and there was quite a frenzy going on. I am quite knowledgeable about wildlife, so my first thought was, the nest is being attacked by other wasps or hornets,,,,,,, I must get some photos of this.

I took a few photos, admittedly from a distance, but they didn't seem to be in war path mode, and didn't bother  me. so I moved closer to take some more, and upon closer inspection of the photos, and the area under the nest, there seemed to be no battle going on, no dead wasps or attackers had fallen under the nest. Ruling my first impression of what was going on out.

The interesting thing was when I had a close look at the photos was that there were several queen sized wasps around the entrance to the nest. This is June, from what Ive read, wasps are supposed to produce queen wasps in the Autumn (September, November) by feeding the developing grubs a different diet from worker grubs. Then the new queens fly off and mate with a male wasp from another nest, who dies shortly afterward, and the new queen wasp then hibernates over winter to start up another nest the following year.

My thoughts are, is this evolution in action????,  we had a very hard early start to winter here, it started in November with severe conditions that only the fittest for purpose would have survived. So those that did make it through that time would have to have been deep in hibernation before then, we then had quite a mild spring. So subsequently the ones that hibernated early on, would be active far earlier on than others of their kind when the winter had passed.