In mid May of 2025, I ran into something I rarely get to see as a pest professional. It was a typical Wisconsin spring day doing Pest Control in Germantown, mild temperatures, clear skies, and nothing out of the ordinary. I was performing a routine every other month Proactive Pest Shield service for one of my customers when I noticed a bald faced hornet fly out of a shrub while I was refilling a rodent bait station. Seeing one this early in the season immediately caught my attention. Bald faced hornets usually do not become noticeable until later in the summer, with population growth ramping up closer to July. I informed the customer and removed the nest that same day as I normally would. What really surprised me was the size. While it was not massive by late season standards, anything larger than a baseball in May is unusual, yet this nest was somewhere between a softball and a volleyball in size. As a matter of fact, I typically don't see these wasps developing much at all until June. I was glad I came across it early because at that stage I did not even need a bee suit. By August, that would likely have been a different story. The experience made me curious. Could this be a localized population of bald faced hornets capable of starting nests at cooler temperatures around sixty to sixty five degrees? Or was there an unusually stable food source nearby that allowed the colony to grow faster than normal? It also made me wonder whether this was something specific to Germantown and nearby suburbs or if similar early season nests might show up as far north as Sheboygan. As spring approaches again, I am genuinely interested to see what turns up this year.

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