Wasp Trivia
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48 free Wasp trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Wasps are the group everyone else evolved out of: bees and ants both descend from wasp ancestors, which is why 'wasp' is really a label for everything narrow-waisted that is not a bee or an ant. This quiz covers that family tree, plus the anatomy that matters: the sting that started life as an egg-laying tube, the haplodiploid genetics that let a queen choose her offspring's sex, the paper nests chewed from wood pulp, and why late summer is when you get stung. It then meets the individual wasps: yellowjackets and the mascot named after them, hornets and the 'murder hornet' that reached Washington State, the bees that cook it alive, fig wasps and the enzyme that dissolves them, cuckoo wasps that roll into a ball, tarantula hawks and New Mexico's schoolchildren, gall wasps and iron gall ink, and the parasitoids that made Darwin doubt a benevolent creator. Justin Schmidt's sting pain index and Aristophanes' chorus of jurors get their turn too. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on wasps and the individual families and species, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Our Bees and Insects quizzes cover the neighbours.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Wasps belong to which order of insects?
Hymenoptera
Hymenoptera. A row of tiny hooks zips each hind wing to the fore wing in flight, so the insect's four wings beat as two; the name is usually read as 'membrane wings'.
Q 02What stops wasps from being a clade, or natural group?
Bees and ants evolved from wasp ancestors
Bees and ants evolved from wasp ancestors, so both sit deep inside the wasp family tree; 'wasp' is just the name for what is left of the branch once they are lifted out.
Q 03In a hornet or yellowjacket nest, which wasps are able to sting?
Only the females
Only the females. That still covers the queen and every worker, so nearly the whole nest is armed, while the males have no sting at all.
Q 04How do most wasp species live?
Solitary
Only the family Vespidae contains social species; the vast majority of females forage and breed independently.
Q 05A wasp's stinger is a modified version of what organ?
The ovipositor
The ovipositor. Many wasps still use it as an egg-laying drill, some boring through solid wood to reach a hidden grub, while in the stinging species it delivers venom instead.
Q 06A male wasp develops from what kind of egg?
An unfertilised egg
An unfertilised egg. A female stores sperm and decides egg by egg whether to use it, and the result is that a male wasp has no father and can never have a son.
Q 07The world's smallest known insect, a wasp just 0.139 mm long, belongs to which group?
Fairyflies
Fairyflies. The record-holders are blind, wingless males that cling to a female with their long legs, and they are thought to mate inside the insect egg they hatched in and die there.
Q 08In Marvel's comics and films, the Wasp is the long-time partner of which superhero?
Ant-Man
Ant-Man. The original Wasp, Janet van Dyne, was also a founding Avenger, and in the comics she is the one who came up with the team's name.
Q 09The emerald jewel wasp stings which insect in the brain, then leads it by an antenna like a dog on a leash?
A cockroach
A cockroach. The venom leaves the roach able to walk but takes away its will to escape, so it follows the wasp to her burrow and stays put while her larva eats it alive.
Q 10What is the primary material social wasps use to build their nests?
Chewed wood pulp
Chewed wood pulp. The wasps scrape fibres from weathered wood, chew them with saliva and spread the paste thin, so the finished nest is a kind of paper.
Q 11A British general is said to have called which city 'a hornet's nest of rebellion'?
Charlotte
Charlotte. The line is credited, without proof, to Lord Cornwallis, whose troops met fierce resistance there in 1780, and it is the reason the city's NBA team is called the Hornets.
Q 12Adult social wasps feed chewed insects to their larvae; what do the larvae give them in return?
Sugary saliva
Sugary saliva. Adult wasps live on sugars and never eat the insects they catch, so each grub's sweet droplet is the hunter's own share of the meal.
Q 13When are people most often stung by wasps?
Late summer and early autumn
Q 21In Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire, which character uses 'Wasp' as a hacker handle?
Lisbeth Salander
Lisbeth Salander. Her hacker name matches the small wasp tattooed on her neck, and Larsson said he imagined her as a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.
Q 22Which insect nicknamed the 'cow killer' looks like an ant but is really a wingless female wasp?
Velvet ant
Velvet ant. Its sting is painful enough to earn the 'cow killer' name, yet the insect is not aggressive and stings only to defend itself.
Q 23A yellowjacket can usually do what with its stinger?
Sting repeatedly
Sting repeatedly. A honeybee's barbed sting rips out and kills the bee, but a yellowjacket's lance has only small barbs, so it usually slides free to strike again.
Late summer and early autumn. Colonies stop raising new workers then, and the workers already flying go looking for sweet food, which brings them to picnics and bins.
Q 14Which birds catch wasps in flight, then rub them on a branch to get rid of the sting?
Bee-eaters
Bee-eaters. They hunt only on the wing from an open perch, and the beating and rubbing does more than remove the sting: it squeezes most of the venom out of the insect.
Q 15Greenhouse growers buy the tiny wasp Encarsia formosa to do what?
Kill whiteflies
Kill whiteflies. Each female lays her eggs inside young greenhouse whiteflies, which turn black as the wasp grows within; growers dropped the wasp when chemical sprays arrived in the 1940s, then took it up again in the 1970s.
Q 16Which scientist wrote that wasps whose larvae eat caterpillars alive made him doubt a kindly Creator?
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin. In an 1860 letter he said no kindly God would have designed ichneumon wasps to feed inside living caterpillars, and that, not believing that, he saw no need to think the eye was designed either.
Q 17Aristophanes' comedy The Wasps, first staged in 422 BC, uses a chorus of wasps to represent whom?
Old jurors
Old jurors. The chorus of elderly Athenians behave like a swarm of angry wasps, and the hero is so hooked on jury duty that his son traps him at home with nets.
Q 18Which H. G. Wells novel has a growth formula producing giant wasps, rats and children?
The Food of the Gods
The Food of the Gods. The formula is being tested on chicks at a farm whose careless keepers let it spread, and wasps with three-inch stings are the first giants anyone meets.
Q 19Who thanked USS Wasp in 1942 by asking who said a wasp couldn't sting twice?
Churchill
Churchill. He had asked Roosevelt to send the American carrier on a second run ferrying Spitfires to besieged Malta, and wired the quip once the fighters had flown off.
Q 20Why did Wasps miss the 1871 founding of England's Rugby Football Union?
Its delegate went to the wrong venue
Its delegate went to the wrong venue, and in one telling on the wrong day too, so 21 other clubs founded the union without Wasps, a club named in 1867 when insect names were in fashion.
Q 24Which university's Yellow Jackets sports teams are represented by a mascot named Buzz?
Georgia Tech
Georgia Tech. The nickname came first: fans in the 1890s wore yellow jackets to games, and the insect mascot only followed decades later.
Q 25True hornets belong to which genus?
Vespa
Vespa. It is simply the Latin word for wasp, which Italian kept, and in 1946 Piaggio borrowed it for a little scooter that went on to sell more than a million in ten years.
Q 26The bald-faced hornet of North America is named for face markings of which colour?
White
White. 'Bald' is used as in bald eagle, for a white head, and the insect is misnamed twice over: it is really a black-and-white yellowjacket, not a true hornet.
Q 27What nickname did news media give the Asian giant hornet after it turned up in North America?
Murder hornet
Murder hornet. Scientists never took it up, and in 2022 the Entomological Society of America went the other way, adopting the plainer 'northern giant hornet' as the official common name.
Q 28Which US state declared the invasive northern giant hornet eradicated in 2024?
Washington
Washington. Crews destroyed the nests found near the Canadian border in 2020 and 2021, and officials then waited through three years without a single confirmed hornet before declaring it gone.
Q 29Japanese honeybees mob a giant hornet scout in a tight ball and kill it how?
With body heat
With body heat. Hundreds of bees warm the ball to a temperature that, together with the carbon dioxide they breathe out, kills the hornet but stays a few degrees below what the bees themselves can stand.
Q 30What vital job do tiny fig wasps do for fig trees, which cannot reproduce without them?
Pollination
Pollination. A fig's flowers are sealed inside the young fruit, so a female wasp has to force her way in through a pore so tight it usually tears off her wings, and she dies inside.