# What Do Wasps Eat?

> What wasps eat: Omnivore (insects, nectar, sugary foods), foraging style, and seasonal shifts in Gardens, woodlands, and urban areas.

- **Species:** Wasp (*Vespula vulgaris*)
- **Conservation status:** Least Concern
- **Diet:** Omnivore (insects, nectar, sugary foods)
- **Habitat:** Gardens, woodlands, and urban areas
- **Lifespan:** Workers a few weeks; queens about a year
- **Top speed:** Up to ~25 km/h (16 mph) in flight
- **Canonical HTML:** https://globalanimalguide.org/animals/wasp/what-do-wasp-eat/
- **Parent profile:** https://globalanimalguide.org/animals/wasp/
- **Last reviewed:** 2026-07-16

## Quick answer

The common wasp (Vespula vulgaris) is a familiar yellow-and-black flying insect of gardens, woodlands, and urban areas across the northern hemisphere. Workers grow to about 1.2 to 1.7 cm long and fly at up to around 25 km/h, living in large paper nests built by a single queen. Wasps are omnivores that hunt insects to feed their grubs and visit nectar and sugary foods themselves. Workers live only a few weeks while queens survive about a year.

## Who should skip this page

Skip this if you need a captive feeding plan from a veterinarian. This page is wild diet, not a pet-care sheet.

## Life inside the colony

Common wasps are social insects that live in colonies founded each spring by a single overwintered queen. She builds a small paper nest from chewed wood fibres and raises the first workers, who then take over expanding the nest and gathering food. By late summer a nest may hold thousands of workers. The colony produces new queens and males in autumn, after which the old nest dies off and only newly mated queens survive the winter.

## Help protect the Wasp

Even familiar animals lose ground as wild habitat keeps shrinking worldwide.

[Donate to wildlife protection](https://worldanimalrescuenetwork.org/donate/)

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Source: Global Animal Guide (https://globalanimalguide.org/animals/wasp/what-do-wasp-eat/). Licensed CC BY-NC 4.0 — free for non-commercial reuse with attribution.