Bald-Faced Hornets in Ohio – Information and Facts

Bald-Faced Hornet Stings

Bald-faced hornets, Dolichovespula maculata, have a reputation as aggressive, dangerous stinging insects in Northeast Ohio. A lot of that comes from nests that go unnoticed until someone is already next to one. They sting on contact, and they can sting more than once. The stinger is smooth, so it does not tear out the way a honey bee’s barbed stinger does. Bees sting once and leave the stinger behind. Bald-faced hornets do not. When a nest is threatened they can also spray venom from the stinger toward a person’s face and eyes. That is a defense, not a mid-air attack, and it is not a reason to rank the sting as worse than every other wasp. They are not looking to sting you. Disturb the nest and the guards will.

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Bald-Faced Hornet Nests

Bald-faced hornets are not aggressive unless there is a territorial threat to the hive. Watch an active nest and you will see workers guarding the entrance. Stare at the hole long enough and at least one worker is staring back.
A bald-faced hornet nest is a beautiful piece of work, and most of them should be left alone. Like other yellowjackets, they build paper nests. They chew cellulose into a paste, close to papier-mâché. Up close the wood fibers are marbled, because they mix different kinds of wood into one sheet and wrap that around layers of comb.

The nest is gray and papery, shaped more like a football or a pear than a ball, and it becomes a pest problem when it hangs in line with people. Most other nests can be left alone. They hang in trees and shrubs anywhere from 3 feet off the ground to 60 feet or more.

Homeowners often find them in fall, when the leaves drop. A nest that sat at head height in an ornamental tree all summer is suddenly obvious, and the question is how the lawn got mowed that whole time without anyone getting stung.

Hornet or Wasp?

The other misconception is the name. This stout-bodied wasp is not a hornet. It is an aerial yellowjacket. The ivory markings on the face are why people call it bald-faced. White-faced hornet, bull wasp, and blackjacket are the other common names. The true hornets in the genus Vespa that have lived in North America are the European hornet, an introduced species, and the northern giant hornet, which was found in Washington in 2019 and declared eradicated in the United States in December 2024. You will not see a northern giant hornet in Cleveland. You will see bald-faced hornets, and they are yellowjackets.

Bald-Faced Hornet Diet

Bald-faced hornets are beneficial. They are fierce predators. They eat a lot of flies, and they eat plenty of other yellowjackets. Nests are often littered with yellowjacket remains, enough to stain the paper yellow. Soft-bodied insects are the favorite prey: bagworms, aphids, caterpillars. Where those are abundant, bald-faced hornets usually are too.

Workers chew prey into a pulp and feed it to the larvae. The workers then eat what the larvae excrete. Late in the year, reproduction slows and there are fewer larvae to tend. A large nest holds about 300 female workers. The diet shifts from protein to sugar. More nectar, more ripe fruit, the same late-season pattern as other yellowjackets.

Bald-Faced Hornet Life Cycle

In spring, the fertilized queen comes out of shelter and starts the nest alone. She lays the first eggs and cares for the young until there are enough workers to take over. She is usually the largest wasp in the colony. Workers and queens run roughly half an inch to three-quarters of an inch. Size is how you pick her out, not a lack of hair.

Once the colony is big enough, she stops building and stops feeding larvae. For the rest of the season her job is reproduction. Workers forage, build, defend the nest, and care for the brood. All of the workers are female. Males exist to mate.

In autumn she produces next year’s queens and the males. They leave the nest and mate in flight. The males die. The fertilized queens find a place to overwinter: a wall void, an attic, a hollow tree, under bark. The workers freeze. The nest is not reused the next year.