The air conditioning brigade
The nest is buzzing with activity, inside and out; foragers are coming and going, carrying out their regular duties collecting food, water, and building material. The 6 hornets seen here, surrounding the entrance, are on cooling duty; anchored in place and fanning their wings to whip up a breeze, cooling down the busy nest.
Bald-faced hornets have one of the larger colonies, as wasps go, with often between 400 to 700 individuals working to maintain the nest, feed the colony and prepare for the future.
The queens are the only ones that live through the winter, hiding in leaf litter or under loose tree bark. They start up the next year's nest in early spring, doing the initial building, raising and feeding young until the brood is large enough to allow her to concentrate on just laying eggs.