Normally by the third week of August our wasp diary is the busiest part of the day. Loft nests at full size, bin-store nests turning aggressive, and a steady run of calls from pubs and garden centres. This year is different. Wasp nest call-outs across Hertfordshire are a fraction of a typical August, and several of our regular commercial sites have not reported a single nest all season.
Customers keep asking the same question on the doorstep: where have all the wasps gone? The honest answer is that this has been an exceptional year, and the prolonged heat we have had across the UK is the most obvious factor in what we are seeing on the ground.
What we are seeing in the field
- Far fewer active wasp nests than a normal season, and the nests we do find are often smaller than we would expect for late August.
- Very few spring queens reported by customers in April and May, which is usually the first signal of how busy the wasp season will be.
- Noticeably quieter bumblebee and honeybee activity in gardens, with several beekeeping contacts reporting weak colonies and poor forage.
- More calls about wasps clustering around water — dripping taps, ponds, pet bowls — than around food, which is typical behaviour in extreme heat.
Why extreme heat hits nesting colonies hard
A wasp nest is a paper structure with almost no insulation. In a loft or a south-facing wall cavity during a sustained heatwave, internal temperatures can climb well beyond what developing brood tolerates, and workers end up spending their day fanning and ferrying water instead of feeding larvae. Colonies that spend the summer cooling themselves rather than growing simply never reach full size.
Drought compounds it. Wasps chew weathered wood and plant fibre to build the nest, and both become scarce and brittle in baked conditions. Their protein supply — caterpillars, aphids, flies and other soft-bodied insects — also collapses when vegetation dries out early, so there is less food coming through the door at exactly the point a colony needs it most.
Bees face a related problem from the other direction. When flowering finishes weeks early because plants shut down in the heat, nectar and pollen dry up mid-season. Colonies that looked strong in June can stall in July, and solitary bees that emerge to find nothing in flower produce very few offspring for next year.
Is this a good thing?
For anyone who has been stung, a quiet wasp year feels like a win. Ecologically it is not. Wasps are significant predators of garden and crop pests, and both wasps and bees pollinate widely. A season with very few of either tends to show up the following year as more aphids, more caterpillar damage and poorer fruit set. We would rather manage nests where they present a genuine risk to people than see the population collapse altogether.
What it means for next season
A weak year usually produces fewer new queens going into hibernation, which points to a slow start next spring. But wasps recover quickly given one favourable year — a mild winter followed by a damp, mild spring can put numbers back to normal in a single season. We would not assume a quiet 2026 means a quiet 2027.
It also changes what we look for. With fewer nests around, the ones that do establish are often in awkward, heat-sheltered places: north-facing eaves, shaded outbuildings, cool cavities and underground voids. If you have wasps coming and going from one repeated point on the building, it is still worth a look even in a quiet year.
Seen a nest this year? We would like to know
We are logging wasp and bee sightings across Hertfordshire this season to build a clearer picture of how the heatwave has affected local populations. If you have an active nest, or you have noticed unusually few wasps and bees in your area, tell us — and if a nest is somewhere it could put people at risk, call us on 01727 601 007 and we will deal with it safely. Honeybee swarms are never destroyed; we refer those to a local beekeeper for collection.