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@Oliver Schick
I saw a very large wasp (about two inches long) in Germany this week, but I don't know what it was, and I didn't have a camera on me. It couldn't find its way out of a tram window, so I helped it with a newspaper. I didn't recognise it because it had a very strange-looking lower body, without the typical wasp stripes but some kind of red blotch instead. I couldn't see if there was perhaps an injury. It seemed lively enough and not lacking in energy—in November! It may have been a queen that hadn't begun hibernation yet. I don't know when they usually start, but I would have thought it must previously have been before November. Anyway, I think these kinds of wasp are very beautiful and I loved seeing it, but I wanted to get it out of there before someone else attacked it.
A couple of weeks ago, I walked past some kind of pest control person who had just sprayed a wasps' nest in a front garden with something nasty and warned me about it, saying I should go around it in the carriageway. I did but when I looked at it, there were hundreds of wasps swarming around in that white nasty stuff haze—in late October, when most of them should already have died off. I went back to him and apparently the residents hadn't noticed the nest all summer but he was called when the wasps started to look for sweet stuff.
Quite generally, I'm still seeing so many insects around that it just seems out of whack.