Some animals have the incredible ability to build nests out of just about anything. But with all the work they take to construct, you’d think there was a limit to how big they can make them, right? Wrong! From huge hidden hives to colossal car-consuming colonies, those animal architects know no bounds. Let's suit up and get stuck into some of the most jaw-dropping nests ever discovered!
Giant Yellowjacket Nest
There are wasps, there are angry wasps, and then there are Yellowjackets. Those notoriously aggressive predatory pests are famous for their defensive behaviors, which see them swarm and sting repeatedly if they sense danger.
Unlike most wasps, those insects tend to build their nests underground inside abandoned rodent burrows, meaning they have just one entrance to defend and protect. At least, that’s what most yellowjackets do, although this colony below seems to have missed the memo! Discovered in a shed in Patterson, Louisiana, back in 2017, exterminator Jude Verret was faced with.
Huge Hornet Nest Removal by Stinger Creations That Yellowjacket nest had engulfed everything and anything in its way, taking over most of the ground space of the shed! But before he could start removing the nest, Verret was suddenly bombarded! And it only got worse the further in he ventured. As he began tearing the nest apart with his gloved hands, thousands of wasps emerged and started to attack. They flew at Verret so viciously that you can barely hear him talking over the sound of their tiny bodies pelting the camera! But it would take more than thousands possibly tens of thousands of yellowjackets to stop Verret from doing his job.
Over the course of 45 minutes, he stripped the entire nest from old storage boxes and garden tools without getting stung even once! Which is incredibly lucky, seeing as the venom in those stings can kill an adult man. Granted, it would have taken about 1,500 stings to kill him, so it’s a good thing Verret was suited and booted instead of undertaking that heroic task in his boxers!
Yellowjacket Super Nests of Alabama
When the weather starts to get warm, most people in the America celebrate with a pool party or a picnic. But in Alabama, residents can have their summer celebrations ruined by the discovery of skin-crawling, Yellowjacket super nests.
Typically, colonies of those ground-dwelling devils form small nests of around 4,000 workers in the summer, which tend to die off during the cold winter. But when winters are mild, more and more of those colonies survive into the following summer. That results in huge colonies that start constructing colossal, perennial nests all over the south-eastern state.Back in the Alabamian summer of 2006, a colony of over
15,000 yellowjackets completely took over the inside of that old car! They coated the car from window to wheel with the paper like material that cocoons the inner layers of the nest. That is made from wood fiber that the wasps chew up and mix with their saliva, creating a papery pulp.
They then spit it out and mold it into the shape they need. Although, if they’re left unchecked and the colony keeps growing, they’ll just keep building and building and that poor car’s owner found that out the hard way!But that was just one of a staggering 90 super nests found that year some of which were in even stranger places! Like that one, which was discovered inside an old, discarded mattress. You can even see how the critters shaped the inner combs of the nest around the mattress’ wiring.
They look incredibly similar to a honeycomb, but I promise there’s nothing sweet about them. It’s in those hexagonal hellscapes that Yellowjackets store and raise their eggs, which eventually hatch into even more of the insidious insects! So, it’s lucky no one was taking a nap on that old mattress, or they might have received a very rude and painful wakeup call!Fortunately, after the sickening summer of 2006, residents were able to rest easy. A string of cold winters returned, killing off any possibility of the perennial Yellowjacket revival, that was until recently. In 2019, a quiet road in Shelby County was suddenly abuzz with activity when a humungous super nest was discovered on the roadside.
Yellow jacket super nest discovered in Shelby County by WVTM 13 News At around 5 ft tall and 3 ft wide, researchers estimated that a staggering 15,000 wasps were hunkered inside the papery super nest! It doesn’t look like those gigantic pest nests will be going away any time soon. So, if you do decide to visit Alabama in the future, remember to keep your windows rolled all the way up!
Florida’s Freaky Yellowjackets
If you thought you were safe from ever seeing a huge Yellowjacket nest because you don’t live in a southern state think again! The mind-bogglingly large nest below was discovered deep in the woods of Tampa, Florida, and was estimated to be at least 8 ft tall by 6.5 ft wide!
MASSIVE Yellow Jacket wasp nest in Florida by FunkensteinJr
The frightening footage above was filmed by insect expert Jonathan Simpkins who claimed that, in his 20 years of experience, he’d never seen a nest that huge! As they started to swarm defensively, he estimated that there were literally millions of worker wasps crawling around inside, along with thousands of queens.Usually, Yellowjacket nests are founded by a single egg-laying queen, called “the foundress”. She’s the one who lays the eggs that develop into new workers and wasp queens. While the new wasp queens typically fly off to founder their own nests, the workers stay although most of them are eventually killed off by cold winter weather.But if a nest manages to survive not just one, but multiple mild winters like that Tampa abomination, which Simpkins claimed was around 4 years old it just continues to grow! That allows it to harbor multiple egg-laying queens, resulting in million-strong swarms that make you want to run and hide. Despite their apocalyptic numbers, Simpkins stormed in and neutralized the colony over the course of just 2 days! Can you imagine how big that nest would have gotten if it had been left a few more years?
Malibu Wasps
Now that you’ve learned just how aggressive Yellowjackets can be, would you ever get in a car with a whole nest of them? For most sane people, the answer is obviously no way. But as it turns out, Jude Verret is not most sane people! That exterminator extraordinaire was once again called out to South Louisiana, where someone had discovered a huge Yellowjacket nest that had completely overrun an abandoned Chevy Malibu.
Malibu wasps GOPR1877 by Stinger Creations Much like their Alabama cousins, that perennial colony was only able to get car-consumingly big thanks to the warm southern climate. But instead of reaching for a flamethrower, Verret put on his equipment, threw open the door and hopped right in!
He even invited his friend to join him, though one look at the front seat was enough to make them think twice. Rather than run for the hills, his friend then tried the back seat, only to discover the nest had fully embedded itself in every crevice of the car. They can even be seen bulging through the air vents.
The Bee Man VS El Camino Car Nest
But it’s not just Yellowjackets that are capable of adding a little junk to a car’s trunk! Back in 2018, bee removal specialist Travis Watson was called out to tackle a gigantic nest which had taken over an old El Camino. When he arrived, he quickly realized that that wasn’t just any old nest, but one belonging to an angry colony of European Hornets.
Horrifying Giant European Hornets built a nest in an El Camino by The Bee Man That massive breed of wasp has workers that can reach over an inch in length, as you have seen in the video above, from the size of them compared to his thumb! Could you imagine something that huge crawling over your thumb? Fortunately, Watson was a true professional, and instead of removing his limbs, he began gently smoking out the car.Smoke blocks out pheromones that wasps, hornets, and bees release to communicate with one another. Without being able to coordinate, they can’t swarm, preventing an organized and painful attack. That ingenious tactic gave Watson plenty of time to pull the papery nest apart calmly and carefully which took him just a matter of minutes. Although he’d brought a sizable plastic bag to dump the nest in, it was much larger than he’d first anticipated.But, like some kind of Mary Poppins style miracle, he managed to fit it all in there! You can only commend him for such an effort, most would have set the whole thing on fire!
Giant Wasp Nest
When you buy a new house, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. The electrics might be faulty, the pipes might be a bit leaky, or like new homeowner Zhang Juwei you might find a 6 ft wasp nest hanging perilously from your ceiling!
Huge 6ft Wasps Nest Occupies Newly-Built Home by Newsflash The house Mr Zhang had bought, which was in China’s Henan province, had been left unoccupied for over a year. But by the time Zhang finally decided to furnish the property, wasps in the area had already moved in! Fortunately, the giant, dangling structure was long abandoned, as the wasps had died of starvation the previous winter.Although that still left Mr Zhang with the conundrum of how to remove such a massive natural monument. Was he meant to burn it, or chop it down? Personally, I’d have been tempted to turn it into a piñata! But Zhang saw the nest as something of a gift, so he enlisted the help of the local authorities to help him saw it down in one piece!They allowed him to keep the nest, though it’s not entirely clear what he did with it. Perhaps he turned it into some sort of artsy centerpiece for his new home? Though hopefully he triple-checked the nest was wasp free, as I don’t imagine those insects would make the friendliest roommates.
The Tennessee Bee Whisperer
As enticing as empty homes are to nesting insects, the rooms aren’t the only spaces they like to haunt. Warm, shielded hollows inside the walls of some houses provide the perfect spots to build new nests as one unlucky homeowner discovered. He’d hired a local pest control company after noticing bees clambering in and out of the outer wall of his house.
But despite their best extermination efforts, the clever critters survived, forcing him to turn to Tennessee’s premier
“Bee Whisperer” also known as David Glover. First, Glover got a feel for just how big the hidden hive really was by using a thermal camera. After checking the readings, he was staggered by the size of the colossal heat signature!
With no other way to get to the heart of the hive, Glover started smoking the entrances before prizing each individual brick away from the wall. He slowly worked his way down until the entire colony was completely exposed, revealing a massive set of 3 foot wide 5 foot tall combs! It took Glover more than four hours to safely separate all the honeycomb from the protective stingers of 35,000 honeybees! But eventually, the entire hive was removed and relocated!
Huge Wasp Nest In Bed
Don’t you hate it when you invite guests over to stay in your guest bedroom, but they just won’t take the hint to leave? With humans, it so annoying, but when a nest of wasps moves in like they did in the house in Winchester, England it’s an honest to god nightmare! The scene below greeted pest controller John Birkett, after a homeowner discovered the nest lining the bed of her spare room.
She hadn’t used the room in months, but had left a small window open, giving the wasps ample opportunity and time to take over the bed.
Measuring in at a huge 3 ft wide on the surface, the wasps had chewed through the pillow and bedding to make their nest even larger on the inside.According to Birkett, it would have taken at least three months for the wasps to build a nest that size, which accommodated a frightening 5,000 of the winged beasties. While they chewed up almost everything on the bed, Birkett was fortunately able to save that incredibly fetching crocheted blanket!
Termite Nest In Wall
It’s not just bees and wasps that can build nauseatingly huge nests, and that’s proven by the discovery made by Australia’s Forensic Pest Management Services. They were called out to a house in the suburbs of Sydney where an old termite colony had been found. Not in a mound in the ground, as you might expect but in the very walls of the property! One branch of it was so large that it took up an entire drywall cavity from floor to ceiling.
Forensic Pest Management Services discovers a massive termite nest in a wall cavity by christhemantaylor
Though the termites had been exterminated, that nest had once been thriving with thousands of Drywood termites a type of pest that feeds on the cellulose in dry wood. That makes empty sections of drywall the perfect place for them to hide, allowing them to create hundreds if not thousands of maze-like tunnels from the inside out! As more and more sections of the wall were torn away, it became clear that that nest had been built up inside the house over several years at least!
Eric “Critter” McCool
Back in 2014, the sleepy town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, was given one hell of a wake-up call when a monstrous insect mound was discovered lurking in a storage yard. Without hesitation, they called in local bee extraction expert Eric “Critter” McCool. But those weren’t no bees they were Yellowjackets, ones which had formed some colossal nests in an old fold down camper!
Enormous yellow jacket hive discovered in Berkeley County by The Berkeley Observer Shocked by the sheer size of what he was looking at, McCool filmed the beginning of the extraction, which would turn out to be one of the largest in history! He estimated it to be a
gargantuan 10 ft long, 7 ft wide and 2 ft tall, meaning it contained around 350,000 wasps! Fortunately, McCool wasn’t phased by that and began tearing the entire nest to shreds, removing 37 of the queens by hand!
Weavers Nest
As incredible as nests built by insects can be, they’re nothing in comparison to the elaborate treetop roosts that birds can build specifically, Sociable Weaver Birds! Those unbelievable birds build large, permanent nests in the trees of southern Africa so large, they can house up to 400 birds at once! That makes them some of the largest structures known to be built by birds, which is a massive feat when you consider that they’re only about 5.5 inches long!
But how does something so small create something so huge? As you might imagine, it takes a lot of teamwork! They use different materials for different purposes, so large twigs make up the roof while softer plant materials and cotton line the nesting chambers.As more chambers are added on, the ever growing nest begin to resemble a hay bale that’s been launched into a tree or, on occasion, a particularly appealing telephone pole! But as haphazard as they look, the structural integrity of those massive mounds is second to none. In fact, they’re so sturdy that some nests have accommodated generations of Sociable Weavers for over 100 years!
The Eerie Caterpillar Tree
This next insect take-over isn’t exactly a nest, but it’s certainly consumed everything in its path! Back in 2018, a tree in North Yorkshire, England, drew a lot of attention after onlookers saw it was completely coated branch to trunk in a mysterious white slime. With all that ooze, it seemed like it had been plucked straight out of a horror film! But as locals braved a closer look, they made a shocking discovery it wasn’t slime coating the tree, it was webbing!
The entire area had been infested by thousands of moth caterpillars, which had worked together to spin those huge sheets of silk webbing. Usually, moth caterpillar webs like that are small and, for the most part, unnoticeable. Which is just as well, as the silk blankets protect the caterpillars from the eyes of any nearby predators like birds and wasps.Brilliantly, that tiny silk canopy provides a safe haven in which they can gorge themselves on food before they start to pupate into moths later in the year. But they’re not always so subtle! Warm summers can encourage huge outbreaks of the insects, allowing them to create those huge communal webs with tens of thousands of caterpillars crawling around inside them!
The German Wasp Nest
With a name like “The German Wasp”, it’s tempting to imagine those little insects hilariously wearing lederhosen and snacking on schnitzel! But the reality of what those wicked wasps can do isn’t as funny as it is terrifying something that New Zealand found out back in 2019.
Lurking in the wilds of the North Island city of Rotorua,
German Wasps had created that bulbous abomination nearly 10 ft up a ponga tree. Measuring in at a gargantuan 6.5 ft tall with a 6.5 ft circumference, local experts estimated that that thing must have weighed somewhere between 220 and 330 lbs!
Massive wasp nest discovered near Rotorua by RNZ
At the top end, that’s the same weight as an average sumo wrestler, though you wouldn’t have wanted to fight that thing in the ring! Mainly because, unlike a sumo wrestler, it was estimated to be holding close to a million wasps. As big as that may seem, it’s nothing in comparison to the world record title holder of largest wasp nest which coincidentally was also found in New Zealand.Not only that, but it was also made by German wasps, way back in 1963! According to the reports, it measured in at a staggering 12.2 ft long and had a circumference of over 18 ft. Its gargantuan size made it so heavy that it apparently fell out of the tree it had been constructed in!
Seven-Meter Wasp Nest Found In Abandoned House
As large as you’ve learned those nests can get, the discovery of a truly unusual nest on the Canary island of La Gomera threw its residents into a state of sheer disbelief! Locals of the beautiful San Sebastián raised their concerns back in 2013 about an old house in the city, which had apparently been abandoned. Insects were clambering in and out of the walls, and an incessant buzzing could be heard from behind the front door.
Officers were called out to investigate, but what they discovered stopped them dead in their tracks. Behind the front door, a colossal wasp nest had overtaken the entire inner hallway of the house! Millions upon millions of wasps reportedly began to swarm, as the grounded nest was active and teeming with the incessant insects.
Experts were called in to assess the situation and reported the nest to be an
astonishing 21.9 ft in length! At that size, it would have been about the same length as a small school bus! Although, nobody would have dared to ride that thing even if you’d paid them! The experts later explained that the wasps were an invasive species, likely from Africa, as local wasps weren’t capable of building a nest that large.The home was then cordoned off as police tried to locate the owners of the property and determine how best to handle that titanic nest. Surely, the only realistic solution would have been to kill that absolute abomination with fire!
If you were amazed at these huge nests you might want to read about homes built by
animal architects. Thanks for reading!
