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It was 9 June when I noticed a miniature paper “lampshade” hanging from the back beam of our shed. “Look at this wasps’ nest,” I shouted before realising that some of its creators were heading straight for me. We shut those doors and weren’t been able to open them for 10 weeks.

In that time, all we knew was that a sisterhood of wasps was trafficking every few seconds to the shed’s rear wall. They then flew up into a slit giving access to the interior. Only this week, now almost all the activity has ceased, have we managed to reopen the doors.

The nest was steadily expanded to the size of a football. Through photographs I’m able to work out that workers widened their search operations to go from four to at least nine wood sources, each a different shade. Who knows how many wasps were involved in the finished architecture, but a big nest can include 5,000 workers and a cumulative total of 25,000 during the colony’s life.

The nest exterior is made up of roughly equal coloured bands of pulp-paper from off-white to cedar red. Calculating how many journeys were entailed in each separately accreted strip is anyone’s guess. I can work out that roughly 5cm of vertical wall involves 36 different bands. I also notice that there are further nest layers inside the outer wall, and wasps refashion the interior as the family’s requirements expand. We have to presume that within are six to 10 suspended and horizontal tiers of brood cells, where all the offspring were raised.

We can only imagine the tens of thousands of insect victims from our garden that underpinned these processes. Even more remarkable is that just as adults feed the larvae, so they themselves are fed on sugars in the saliva of their younger sisters. Over all presided one mother, who chemically castrated her daughters and subdued their own brooding instincts in the interests of the genetic whole.

This exquisite paper sphere therefore represents a new generation, a family saga, a kind of ghost town, a sculptural work of art, and all was funded by our garden’s invertebrate economy. I call that a summer of extraordinary work.

• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024, is available now at guardianbookshop.com