Somewhere in our garden - or close by - there must be a nest of these tree wasps Vespula sylvestris because they are all over the garden at the moment.
When their breeding season comes to an end the wasps concentrate of feeding themselves with anything sweet that they can find, instead of catching insects to feed the brood - and that's when they become a nuisance, entering kitchens to satisfy their craving for sweet food.
Sometimes they just seem to sit around and do nothing and that's when they are at their most menacing, because it's easy to accidentally grab one when you're weeding the garden - as I know to my cost. At least when they are flying they buzz and you can hear them coming.
Fortunately there some plants in the bog garden that divert their attention. They find figwort Scrophularia nodosa absolutely irresistible .... although they do struggle a bit to reach the nectar in the flowers .....
In order to force their heads into the flowers they have to curl their tail right underneath .....
.... and hug the flowers, but once they get a good grip on the flower they can force their wedge-shaped heads in, picking up pollen and transferring it to other flowers as they feed. I've spent quite a while watching them and, in comparison with bees, they are unmethodical flower visitors. Bees will usually move from one flower to the next-nearest one, whereas the wasps seem to forage around at random, often coming back to the same flower several times within a few minutes.
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