Metric Paper Wasp

About the Metric Paper Wasp

The Metric Paper Wasp is the dark, sleek member of the Texas paper wasp family. It has a rusty red-brown head and thorax, a mostly black abdomen, orange-yellow lower legs, and smoky blue-black wings. That two-tone look sets it apart from the all-red Red Paper Wasp and the yellow-banded Guinea Paper Wasp.

Like its relatives, it chews weathered wood into pulp and builds an open, single-comb paper nest hung from a stalk, often in shrubs, low branches, or a sheltered corner of a shed. It hunts caterpillars to feed its larvae, which makes a summer colony one of the garden's best pest controllers, and the adults fuel up on nectar.

The colony lasts a single season. Mated queens spend the winter tucked into bark or woodpiles, start new nests in spring, and by the first freezes the work is done.

This one was photographed on July 8, 2023, in eastern Travis County, working along a weathered stump -- exactly the kind of gray, sun-dried wood paper wasps scrape for nest fiber -- during the same summer macro session that produced the grass-carrying wasp a few pages over.