Red wasps eat nectar, fruit juices, and other sugary liquids as adults, while their larvae feed on chewed-up insects like caterpillars, beetle larvae, and cicadas. This split diet is one of the more interesting things about these common paper wasps: the adults and the young eat completely different foods, and the colony’s foraging behavior shifts dramatically over the course of a season.
Why Adults and Larvae Eat Different Foods
Red wasps (species in the genus Polistes, most commonly Polistes carolina) have an extremely narrow “waist” between their midsection and abdomen. This pinch point means adults are largely restricted to a liquid diet. They sip flower nectar, fruit juices, tree sap, and other sugar-rich liquids for the carbohydrate energy they need to fly, forage, and maintain the colony.
Larvae, on the other hand, are carnivorous. They’re soft, grub-like creatures sitting in the cells of the paper nest, and they need protein to grow. Adult workers do the hunting, capturing small invertebrates like caterpillars, flies, beetle larvae, cicadas, and even spiders. They chew the prey into smaller pieces and fly it back to the nest, where they feed the pulpy mass directly to the developing larvae. Workers capture prey with their jaws rather than relying on their stinger.
What Red Wasps Hunt
Red wasps are generalist predators, meaning they don’t specialize in one type of prey. Their most common targets include caterpillars (especially pest species found on garden plants), beetle larvae, cicadas, flies, and other soft-bodied invertebrates. They’re often spotted hunting around flowering plants, where many of these prey insects also gather.
This hunting habit is why gardeners and farmers often consider red wasps beneficial. They pollinate plants while drinking nectar and simultaneously reduce populations of crop-damaging caterpillars and beetle grubs. A single colony with dozens of workers can remove a meaningful number of pest insects from a garden over a summer.
How Their Diet Shifts Through the Season
Red wasp foraging looks very different in June than it does in September. Early in summer, the colony is growing fast. The queen has laid eggs, larvae are developing in the nest cells, and workers are focused on finding protein. During this phase, you’ll see them actively hunting insects and even scavenging bits of meat from outdoor meals.
By late summer, the larvae have pupated and no longer need to be fed. The demand for protein drops sharply, and workers shift almost entirely to sugar sources. This is the time of year when red wasps become noticeable nuisances at picnics, hovering around sodas, ripe fruit, jam, and anything sweet. They’re feeding themselves now, not provisioning the nest, and their liquid-focused bodies crave sugar.
In late fall, red wasps can often be found on goldenrod and other autumn-blooming flowers, collecting the last available nectar before cold weather shuts the colony down.
Other Things Red Wasps Collect
Food isn’t the only thing workers forage for. They also gather wood fibers and water. The wood fibers, scraped from fences, decks, and dead branches, get mixed with saliva to create the papery material they build their nests from. Water helps with nest construction and temperature regulation on hot days. So if you see a red wasp chewing on a wooden surface, it’s not eating. It’s collecting building material.
Red Wasps as Scavengers
While hunting live prey is their primary protein strategy, red wasps are opportunistic. They’ll scavenge carrion (dead animals or insects) when they find it, and they’re perfectly willing to land on your hamburger or deli meat at an outdoor gathering. This scavenging behavior becomes more noticeable in areas where natural prey is scarce or when colonies are large and need more food than hunting alone provides. Unlike yellowjackets, which are aggressive scavengers, red paper wasps tend to be less persistent around human food, but they’ll take advantage of an easy meal when one presents itself.