If you’ve been going around Montreal since about mid-August, you’ve no doubt noticed enormous numbers of wasps. The normally woodland-dwelling insect seems to have found itself a new home in the city.
In fact wherever you go in the city you will see large numbers of the bugs, chiefly near the natural sources of food, such as garbage cans and terraces. On a recent hike to Mount Royal I noticed that it was quite difficult for people to enjoy an ice cream near the Chalet, especially if they had kids — the young ones tend to freak out when they start seeing the yellow-and-black buzzers, so in the heavy tourist areas be prepared to hear a lot of children screaming. Fortunately the wasps we do have don’t seem to be terribly aggressive, and the reported number of wasp stings shows no increase from previous years, even though the population numbers have skyrocketed.
As such the best way to deal with the annoying and large wasps you’ll inevitably notice around you is to ignore them. They’ll fly around you for a few seconds, they may even land on you and walk around for a little bit, but then they fly off, leaving you mercifully unmolested.
That being said, this is merely an observation of the current behavior of our wasps. As temperatures grow colder and days shorter it is quite possible that the wasps will grow more aggressive, especially since quick sources of high-sugar nutrition — especially things like ice cream and sweets at tourism sites — tend to dry out rather sharply come September. It is normal at this time of year for the wasp males to be out in full force away from nests looking for sugary nutrition and females, according to wikipedia.
According to data volunteered by exterminators there is said to be a five-fold increase in the number of wasps this year compared to recent years. No one seems to have a good idea where these new city dwelling wasps nest, although it seems likely that they’ve taken residence in some of the city’s abandoned buildings, where lack of maintenance has made wood structure and decorations soft and an ideal building material for wasp nests.
Still the questions remain — why are all these wasps here just this year? Is there a great big super-nest somewhere in the city that would account for the presence of the insects everywhere in the region, from St-Laurent to Outremont to the Old Port — and probably many other places where I haven’t recently been as well? Why are the wasps so interested in the city now?