Ask most people whether wasps make honey and you’ll get a confident no. That answer is very nearly right — out of the tens of thousands of described wasp species, the number that produce and store honey is in the low double digits, and only one of them lives anywhere in the United States.
For non-aggressive wasps I've had great luck spraying nests with this Spectracide wasp remover in the evening. For a nest up high in an eave, soffit, or tree, this Gotcha pole adapter clamps onto the can so you can spray from the end of an extension pole and treat the nest from 10+ feet away instead of standing right under it. And for anything aggressive I wear this ridiculous-looking upper torso beekeeping suit and keep my distance. It seems silly, but trust me, I learned the hard way.
But “wasp honey” isn’t a myth. It’s a real substance, made by real wasps, and people in Mexico and Central America have been harvesting it for centuries. If you live in south Texas, there is a genuine chance the large gray paper nest in your mesquite or citrus tree belongs to a honey-storing wasp.
This guide covers why honey-making is so rare among wasps, which species actually does it, what homeowners usually see when they think they’ve found wasp honey, and why harvesting it is a bad idea even when you’ve identified it correctly.
Nearly all wasps do not make honey. The paper wasps under your eaves, the yellow jackets in your lawn, the mud daubers on your siding, and every hornet in North America produce no honey at all. They drink sugar and they feed protein to their young, but they store almost nothing.
A handful of tropical and subtropical wasps do. These are the honey wasps, genus Brachygastra — about seventeen described species spread across Mexico, Central America, and South America. One of them, the Mexican honey wasp (Brachygastra mellifica), ranges north into the Rio Grande Valley and the south Texas brush country.
That’s the whole picture. Everything else that looks like wasp honey has a different explanation, and we’ll get to those.
Honey isn’t a byproduct or a treat. For a honey bee colony, it’s a survival budget — a stockpile of concentrated carbohydrate that keeps thousands of adult bees alive and warm through months when no flowers are blooming. Understanding that purpose explains the whole pattern.
A paper wasp or yellow jacket colony is an annual enterprise. It starts in spring with a single overwintered queen, builds through summer, produces new queens and males in late summer, and then collapses. By the first hard frosts, every worker is dead. The only survivors are newly mated queens, which overwinter tucked into leaf litter, a wall void, or under loose bark — sometimes in clusters, in the case of paper wasps — living on the fat reserves in their own bodies rather than on any stored food.
A colony that will not exist in January has no reason to build a January pantry. This is the single biggest reason honey storage never evolved in temperate wasps — the selection pressure simply isn’t there. Our guide on where wasps go in the winter walks through that annual collapse in more detail, and the queen wasp guide covers the overwintering founder.
Honey bees secrete beeswax from abdominal glands, build precise comb from it, and cap ripened honey cells with more wax. Wax is waterproof, food-safe, and reusable.
Wasps have no wax glands. Social wasps chew wood fiber and plant material into pulp, mix it with saliva, and build a papery structure — strong and light for its weight, but porous and absorbent. It’s excellent nursery architecture and poor liquid storage. Mud daubers and potter wasps use soil, which has the same problem. The wasp nest construction guide explains how that material is made and why it behaves the way it does.
Adult wasps are carbohydrate feeders: nectar, tree sap, honeydew from aphids, and ripe or fallen fruit. Larvae are carnivores, fed chewed insect prey by the workers. Most of what a forager brings home is consumed within hours, often passed mouth-to-mouth between nestmates. Some nectar gets held briefly in cells, but it isn’t ripened, concentrated, or capped. See what wasps eat for the full breakdown of that two-menu system.
Brachygastra mellifica is the exception that proves the rule — and it’s an exception for exactly the reason you’d predict. In the warm subtropics, honey wasp colonies can persist for more than one season, and there’s something worth storing food for.
The Mexican honey wasp occurs from Central America north through Mexico and across the Rio Grande into southern Texas — the Lower Rio Grande Valley, the Coastal Bend, and the south Texas brush country. It’s the only honey-storing wasp in the United States. If you live outside deep south Texas, the wasp you’re looking at is not this one. Our Texas wasp species guide covers the state’s full lineup.
Honey wasps build a fully enclosed paper nest — gray-brown, roughly spherical to oval, with an outer envelope and a small entrance hole low on the structure. Nests are usually attached to a branch in a tree or shrub: citrus, mesquite, hackberry, huisache, and Texas ebony are all common hosts. Size ranges from about a softball to well over a foot across on an established colony.
Two features set these colonies apart from the annual wasps most homeowners know:
Workers collect floral nectar, ripen it, and store it in comb cells inside the nest, the same basic process a honey bee uses. It’s genuine honey — sweet, edible, and traditionally harvested in parts of Mexico, where the species has long been valued. The quantities are modest compared with a honey bee hive, which is why it has never become a commercial product.
Honey wasps earn their keep twice over. As nectar foragers they’re effective pollinators — they’re documented pollinators of avocado in Mexico — and as predators they take small insects and caterpillars, which is why they’re generally regarded as beneficial in south Texas orchards and citrus groves. If you want the broader case for leaving wasps alone, see what wasps do for the environment and do wasps pollinate.
Foragers are mild-mannered and won’t bother you at a flower bed. The nest is a different matter: like any large social wasp colony, it will be defended, and a colony with thousands of workers has thousands of potential defenders. The sting itself is comparable to other small vespid wasps — sharply painful, not exceptional.
The practical rule: a honey wasp nest out in a tree well away from doors, walkways, and play areas is best left alone. A nest beside a door, over a patio, or in a fruit tree you actually pick from is a problem worth solving, and not a DIY job at that colony size. Treat it the way you’d treat any large enclosed nest — see the wasp nest removal safety guide and call a professional.
Even with a correct identification, don’t do it. Three reasons, in order of importance:
If you’re curious about honey from unusual insects, the safe route is stingless bee honey (Melipona and related genera), which is produced commercially in Mexico and Central America by people who manage the colonies and know the forage.
Most “I think my wasps are making honey” reports come down to one of these.
Nectar droplets in paper wasp cells. Social wasps do carry nectar back to the nest and may hold it briefly in cells before it’s shared around. Wet, sticky cells in an open paper comb look like honey storage. It isn’t — it’s unripened nectar passing through, gone within a day.
Honeydew. Aphids and scale insects excrete a sugary liquid onto leaves and whatever is beneath them. Wasps drink it eagerly. If you see wasps working over sticky leaves or a sap-glazed car hood under a tree, that sugar came from aphids, not from the wasps.
Yellow jackets robbing a beehive. In late summer, when natural sugar gets scarce and colonies are at peak size, yellow jackets will raid honey bee hives and carry off honey and brood. Homeowners watching wasps stream in and out of a hive with full crops reasonably conclude the wasps are making honey. The honey is the bees’. If you keep bees, this is the season to reduce entrances and add robbing screens. Our yellow jacket guide covers that late-season sugar drive.
A honey bee nest misidentified as a wasp nest. Exposed honey bee comb is yellow-tan wax in flat vertical sheets, with no paper envelope around it. If you see wax comb and dripping honey, you have bees, not wasps — and a very different removal situation, since live bee colonies are usually relocated rather than destroyed. Compare the two in wasp vs bee and the difference between bees and wasps.
Residue in an old nest. Abandoned paper nests often have a shiny or crusted film inside the cells. That’s larval waste and silk caps left behind by the brood, not stored food.
Do hornets make honey? No. Hornets are large social vespids with the same annual, non-storing colony cycle as yellow jackets. The bald-faced hornet’s enclosed gray nest is sometimes assumed to be a hive full of honey — it holds brood and paper, nothing else. See the bald-faced hornet guide.
Do yellow jackets make honey? No. They drink sugar constantly and steal honey from bees, but they produce none.
Do paper wasps make honey? No. They store nectar only in transit, for hours at a time.
Do wasps eat honey? Yes, readily — honey is exactly the kind of concentrated sugar they seek out, especially in late summer. That’s why an open honey jar, a hummingbird feeder, or a soda can draws wasps so fast. See what attracts wasps.
Can you buy wasp honey? Not meaningfully. It’s a traditional local food in parts of Mexico, not a commercial product. Anything sold as “wasp honey” in the United States is almost certainly mislabeled or novelty packaging.
What about bumblebees? Bumblebees store small amounts of a honey-like nectar in wax pots — far less than a honey bee, because bumblebee colonies are also annual. Bumblebees are bees, not wasps, but they come up often in this conversation.
Wasp honey is real and almost vanishingly rare. It exists because a small group of subtropical wasps in the genus Brachygastra keep colonies going across seasons, which makes a stored sugar reserve worth building. Everywhere colonies die every autumn — which is to say, essentially all of the United States outside the deep south Texas range of the Mexican honey wasp — no wasp makes honey, and no wasp ever needed to.
If you’re in south Texas and you’ve found a large enclosed paper nest in a tree, you may well be looking at one of the few honey-storing wasps on the planet, and it’s very likely doing useful work in your yard. Watch it from a distance, keep the area clear if it’s somewhere inconvenient, and leave the honey where it is.
For the wider picture on how wasp colonies live, feed, and defend themselves, start with our wasp behavior and biology hub. For the general version of this question, see do wasps make honey, and for what wasps actually live on, what do wasps eat.