You Can Do a Lot With Spit

If you’re a paper wasp, home is where you hang it.
A great reason for getting into the woods at this time of the year is the opportunity to see the variety of nests animals build, then abandon, only to do it all again next year.
Highly visible are the nests left behind, sort of, by paper wasps. Paper wasps and hornets are social creatures. They live in colonies of workers, queens and males.
Only the inseminated queens overwinter, thus my hesitation to say the nests are abandoned. Queens might also winter over in any protected place; structures such as hollow logs, stumps, under bark and leaf litter.
The first warm days of late April or early May bring the queens to the surface. They select a nest site and build a small paper nest in which eggs are laid. One egg is laid in each cell. As she adds more cells around the edge, eggs are deposited.
Larvae in the center are older with the younger larvae further out. Cells at the rim of the nest contain eggs. After eggs hatch, the queen feeds the larvae. When larvae are ready to pupate, cells are covered with silk, forming little domes over the individual openings. Larvae pupate, emerging later as small, infertile females called "workers." This happens by mid-June. The first adult workers emerge and assume the tasks of nest expansion, foraging for food, caring for the queen and larvae and defending the colony.
The initial nest of the paper wasp is the work of a single female. It has a single layer or "tier" of cells and is not enclosed by envelopes. In hornets, the nests usually consist of a number of stories or "tiers," one below the other and completely enclosed by spherical walls. Each cell may be used for two or three successive batches of brood.
There are 22 species of paper wasps in North America and approximately 700 species world-wide. Most are found in the tropics of the western hemisphere.
The nests of most species are suspended from a single, central stalk and have the shape of an upside-down umbrella. Plant and wood fibers are collected by the wasps, mixed with saliva, and chewed into a papier-mâché-like material that is formed into the thin cells of the nest.
The next time you’re whining about a home repair job, imagine trying to complete it—even make the material you need—using only your mouth.