....Also, does anyone know how wasps and bees get on?
Fine most of the year until the wasps decide to raid their hives.
While there's a nest, the common wasps that you're seeing spend their time going after spiders, flies, grubs, even bits of meat left out in order to feed their larvae. So while the nest is in operation, they usually keep themselves to themselves and unless you really look for them you rarely see them earlier on in the summer. It's when the nest finishes around this time, late August-early September and the Wasp queen goes off to find herself somewhere to hibernate for the winter, that's when the bedlam of this autumn menace starts.
Since the wasps no longer have a nest and young to tend, they try and survive as individuals for as long as they can, so just as you say like a bunch of delinquents, they start looking for sweet things like nectar, ripe fruit, beer etc and will even raid bee hives for the honey. (this can all happen earlier in the year if their nests get destroyed either accidentally or deliberately)
I've been busy doing my two bee hives the last couple of days (over 70lbs of honey so far with an estimate of another 30lbs yet to be harvested - a good productive summer unlike last year) and the wasps have been a bit of a nuisance to say the least trying to freeload on the contents of the hives, the bees can do little to stop them the wasps being quite well armoured, although the wasps are actually quite useful in cleaning the frames of any residue after I've removed the honey comb off them and left them outside in the sunlight.
Many wasp nests (certainly round here) seem to have now finished just this last week so you can expect loose gangs of them loafing around with menace and extreme prejudice until the weather turns cooler later in September and into October and they gradually die off. Having said that, there still seem to be some nests in full flow round here, the wasps still busy scraping and collecting wood of the fences and garden furniture to construct their paper mache nests so depending on if we get an Indian summer, this years
autumn terror might well be a long drawn out process. In general, it's been a bit of a weird year for all insect life, some things seemingly being delayed by both the last cold winter and the wet spring.
The last week we've getting quite a lot of hornets trying to come into our utility room in the evening attracted by the flourescent light in there. Big and rather angry, but very easy to catch in a jamjar and re-release outside. They all have their purpose in the scheme of things so I'm actually reluctant to kill them.
