Flashes of Panic

On the route I ran today, there is a paper wasp nest in a tree. When the tree is leafed out, the nest would be pretty much invisible, but right now it sticks out like a volleyball.

Having just finished Bernd Heinrich's Winter World (which also gave me the name for the FTP server I mentioned a few days ago), I'm now curious about the fate of the nest. If I remember correctly, abandoned wasp nests are recycled by other nest builders (birds, squirrels, chipmunks) which are in abundance around here; the paper is prized by some species. How do they know if the nest is abandoned? I can't remember if wasps overwinter in the nests (probably not), or if they just hold the queen, or eggs, or none of the above. Is any wasp nest in winter an abandoned wasp nest?

This kept me puzzling until the end of the run, when I noticed that, thanks to the amount of time I've been in the pool lately, I smell like heavy-duty household solvents when I sweat. The miasma might even be poisonous, but I'd have to confirm that with chemistry I recall even less than the ins and outs of wasp nests.