How Long Are Wasps Active During a Season?

It starts with a single overwintered queen, who mated the previous fall and spent winter alone in a sheltered spot like leaf litter, emerging on warm spring days to found a nest by herself. Early on, she does all the foraging and building; once the first workers hatch, they take over that labor and the colony's growth accelerates through the summer. Population and colony activity peak in late summer, which is also when foraging for sugar and protein becomes most aggressive as natural food sources start to dwindle.

As the first sustained hard freeze arrives in fall — around Manchester that typically means the back half of October, with the local average first 32°F freeze near October 19 per National Weather Service climate normals — the colony's workers and the founding queen die off. They simply don't survive cold New Hampshire winters, in the nest or anywhere else. The only wasps that make it to the following spring are newly mated queens produced late in the season, and they overwinter alone, away from the nest, not as a group and not inside the structure they built. That's why the nest itself is never reused, by that colony or any other — a fact covered in more depth on /winter-pests-shift/wasps.

A nest found early in the season, before workers have built up numbers, is a genuinely different situation from the same nest found at its late-summer peak — smaller, less defended, and often more workable, which is part of why /top-diy-methods rates early-season paper-wasp nests differently than the same species found later. A nest discovered once sustained cold weather has set in is a different question again: at that point, the honest answer is often that the colony is already finished on its own, which /winter-pests-shift/wasps covers directly.