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Gigantic yellow jacket nests reported all over state, south
Gary Mitchell, a reporter for the Associated Press, points out huge nests in other parts of Alabama and the south and quotes experts who suggest that the nests could be the result of warm winters and drought conditions, or perhaps multiple queens working together to force worker yellow jackets to build the bigger nests. A nest found in Barbour County was as large as a Volkswagen Beetle. In rural Elmore County, a nest has completely filled the interior of an old 1955 Chevrolet parked in a barn. The nest was about the size of a tire in the rear floor seven weeks ago but has spread to fill the entire vehicle. A 6-foot by 3-foot nest on a pond stump in Georgia was recently featured on CNN. Entomologist Dr. Charles Ray at the Alabama Cooperative Extension System in Auburn told the AP of about 16 "super-sized" nests in south Alabama that he was aware of. Ray said that yellow jacket nests are commonly no larger than a basketball and would contain about 3,000 workers and one queen. He said these giant nests might have as many as 100,000 workers and multiple queens. Ray said, "We're not really sure how this multiple queen thing works. It could be that the daughters of the original queen don't leave the nest or that the queens have developed some way to cooperate." He said at least 12 queens were counted in a big nest collected from Macon County. James H. Cane, an entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed that multiple queens could be the reason for big nest. A yellow jacket nest usually dies out each year. "All that overwinters is the future queen," said Cane. But with a warm winter, the yellow jackets continue feeding during the winter months and continue to layer their paper nests. Yellow jackets, like bees, may visit flowers for sugar but unlike bees they are carnivorous, eating insects, carrion and picnic food. Due to the warm winter they were apparently able to find food to survive through the winter, the scientists agreed. Given a queen's egg-laying rate, there is no way a nest with a single queen could get as big in a single season as some of the nests reported, he told AP. He said that in a multiple-queen colony, there is likely space where queens can't get at each other.
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