When temperatures reach around 50 degrees, the queen wasp comes out of hiding and starts looking for places to start her ...

Social wasps (called yellow-jackets in some places) live in colonies consisting of hundreds or thousands of more-or-less sterile female workers and their much larger mother, the egg-laying queen.

A high school teacher trying to solve the mystery of why queen Vespula wasps mate with many different males thinks the practice might have evolved to stave off a catastrophic colony collapse.