A beekeeper finds a paper wasp nest in his storage and kills the colony with petrol to protect his apiary. He then dissects it to reveal the inner structure: chewed wood and plant material layered into a honeycomb-like form with 15-20 layers in small sections. The porous design provides natural air-conditioning, showcasing remarkable engineering despite his regret at destroying it.
I found this wasp nest in my honey super storage unit. In this video, we're going to take a look inside. This was the big, huge wasp nest that was in my honey storage unit, and I have humanely dispatched it. It was causing a real nuisance. It had stung a lot of people up here, so I had to take action. And the way that I did it is I got a bucket full of petrol and I just submerged the whole wasp's nest in petrol, obviously lifting the bucket up to it. But what we're going to do today is we're going to look inside and see What has happened. I don't know what the state is going to be like inside after being killed like that, but we're going to find out in this video. So this is kind of like my favourite bit when it comes to wasp nests. All of this is just like bits of paper and bits of tree and cardboard and bark and anything that the wasps can find. They'll just go and chew it up and spit it out and make these amazing structures, and they just build it up layer after layer. It's really, really nice. What we're going to do is I'm going to take off all of this papery mass From the outside because I think I can get to the main nest in the middle. And it is quite amazing, all of this. Apparently it's used to cool the hive down. They use it as like natural air conditioning. And you can see with all the space, the voids inside with all the air, it's quite amazing. And look how much— if you've ever seen a wasp harvesting wood and you're thinking, where does all that wood go? Look at this here, absolutely tons of it. So that is a crazy amount of wood, but take a look inside. The actual nest there. Oh my goodness, this is crazy. It's a very similar structure to honeycomb. Obviously it's not made of any wax, it's just made of this papery wood material that they go out and forage. But yeah, up close and personal with a wasp's nest. I didn't expect it to be so cool. And I have to say, the biggest surprise is not this bit. I kind of knew what this bit was going to look like. It's the amount of wood, like layer after— I want to do it properly and give it justice— layer after layer after layer. There So many layers here. Like even in this tiny little section there's like 15, 20 layers and they're just building it up layer at a time. And then, you know, you bring all that together in this big mass. That's a huge amount of wood. So though I do feel a bit bad for killing this colony of wasps that was battering my bees and battering everyone who came into the apiary, I am amazed at what they have created. And next time hopefully they'll create it just a little bit further away.
