Why don't we like wasps?

 For the love of wasps -  Why it’s about time to drop the prejudice...

Let’s talk about wasps.  Do you like them? No? Then you’re certainly not alone. Wasps get a bad rep for being pests, for being obnoxious around food and a nuisance at any summer BBQ and picnic.  We swat them, we shoo them away, we squeal and run away and make the most absurd dance when a wasp is near.  We’re panicked and annoyed by their presence and teach our kids to be careful around them.  Whilst it’s definitely true that a wasp sting hurts and can be dangerous for those that are allergic, wasps, with their shiny bright bodies, get a hard time despite being incredibly helpful players in our ecosystem.  

“As adults we no longer see the simple things and the beauty that’s within them”, Clare Newton, award-winning photographer and author of Colour of Silence (2021) explains.  “Take for example a wasp – we fear their presence, but have overlooked their striking and graphic patterns. Or do we watch them long enough to see how intelligent they are...? They come along onto our plates, have a sniff, maybe try a bit and go. Like us they need to eat

and if hedgerows and wild meadows are ploughed up, where do they get food?”

In Colour of Silence, Newton looks, through the medium of photography, at the good, bad and the ugly and asks that we embrace all not just the easy to understand, but the fearful-looking things and fight to protect the natural world we live in. 

Therefore, in this post, we want to clear up the unfair stigma and opinions of those six-legged warriors and shine a light on all the amazing things they do to our environment.  

Social Wasps - an introduction

According to a Prof Hart (2017), “The insects we most commonly identify as "wasps" are the social wasps. Social wasps (called yellow-jackets in some places) live in colonies consisting of hundreds or thousands of more-or-less sterile female workers and their much larger mother, the egg-laying queen.  The handful of colony-living, nest-building species is just a tiny fraction of overall wasp diversity, estimated at more than 9,000 species in the UK alone. Most wasps are solitary, some are tiny (a few species practically microscopic), none ever bother us and virtually all are overlooked.

Social wasps nests start to develop in late spring, when queen wasps emerge from hibernation. Building a small nest of just a few paper cells, the queen must rear the first set of workers alone before the first batch of worker wasps can start to take over the work required by the developing colony.
Wasp workers toil ceaselessly to raise their sister workers from eggs the queen lays, cooperating and communicating in intricate ways to build and defend the nest, collect food and look after the queen. When the colony is large enough the workers start to give some young larvae more food at a much greater rate than usual, triggering genetic switches that cause the development of a potential queen rather than a worker.

Male wasps, who take no part in the social life of the colony, develop from unfertilised eggs in a form of sex determination called haplodiploidy, also found in bees and ants. These male-destined eggs are laid by the queen and rarely by workers, some of whom retain the ability to lay eggs but lack the ability to mate.
Potential queens (called gynes before they head a colony) and males, sisters and brothers of the workers, are the reproductive future of the colony. Mating with males from other colonies, the gynes overwinter before starting a colony of their own the following spring.”

We’ll never consciously meet any of the wasps existing in the UK, however, it is important that we learn to co-exist and even protect our wasps, as without them, things would look quite bleak.  We’ll now present some of the relatively underrated benefits of having wasps around.    

An understudied and misunderstood helper of nature

Professor Seirian Sumner (2021) points to the sad but true fact of current life: “Wasps are one of those insects we love to hate – and yet bees, which also sting, are prized for pollinating our crops and making honey. In a previous study, we found that the hatred of wasps is largely due to widespread ignorance about the role of wasps in ecosystems, and how they can be beneficial to humans.”

Feeding this ignorance is the fact that “wasps are understudied relative to other insects like bees, so we are only now starting to properly understand the value and importance of their ecosystem services. Here, we have reviewed the best evidence there is, and found that wasps could be just as valuable as other beloved insects like bees, if only we gave them more of a chance.” (Sumner, 2021)

Just like a bee 

They may look less fluffy and cute than bees and may scare us with their fierce stripey armour.  They seem more aggressive and mean because their sting appears out of the blue and they don’t die like bees afterwards.  However, wasps are not so unlike bees who we really love and value.  Both bees and wasps have species that can live socially with others or alone.  The common wasp which most of us think of immediately when we think of wasps, lives socially in a nest which they skilfully build of chewed up wood.  That gives the nest its paper-like texture. If you have ever come close to a wasps nest, an empty or inhabited one, you will see just how skilful and intrinsically fabricated their homes are.  
Yes, wasps sting, but only when they feel they need to defend themselves or their nest.
And, just like bees, wasps are important pollinators, even though they are not as effective as bees, who are hairier. So, rather than dismissing wasps as pointless, we need to recognise their importance of being valuable helpers in the pollination process.  Just because we can’t steal honey from them, doesn’t mean they don’t do a precious job.

A recent review by the University College London (2021) showed that wasps contribute to lots of pollination: “Pollination by insects is vital for agriculture, and its economic importance has been valued at greater than $250 billion (US) per year worldwide.”
Moreover, “researchers found evidence of wasps visiting 960 plant species. This included 164 species that are completely dependent on wasps for pollination, such as some orchid species that have evolved adaptations to attract the wasps they rely on, such as an appearance that mimics the back end of a female wasp. Many wasps are also generalist pollinators that visit a wide variety of plants, so the researchers say they could serve as ‘backup pollinators’ if a plant loses its local primary pollinator.” (ULC, 2021)

This shows just one of the reasons as to why wasps are such an integral part of our ecosystem.  Their uses are varied, however, as will be explored in the following sections.

Keeping the pests in check

We may think of wasps as pests, but that would be very unfair.  In fact, wasps are some incredibly important and natural pest controllers and according to Dr Seirian Sumner of University College London, “a world without wasps would mean that we would have to use a lot more pesticides to control the other insects that we dislike and find annoying.” Wasps are also crucial in controlling the populations of centipedes, millipedes and spiders.  Those critters are a huge part of a wasps diet.  In addition, they eat other insects, which they take back to their nests and feed their larvae. Solitary wasps are also useful in controlling pests.  They lay their own eggs amongst the larvae of other insects, for example greenflies. Eventually, the host larvae will be killed by the wasp larvae.  Because they sit right at the top of the invertebrate food chain, they are incredibly important for a balanced ecosystem. To be clear, “it has been estimated that the social wasps of the UK might account for 14 million kilograms of insect prey across the summer. A world without wasps would be a world with a very much larger number of insect pests on our crops and gardens.” (Hart, 2017) .

Moreover, as Hadley (2020) explains, yellowjackets, the most commonly seen wasps in the UK,  “mostly scavenge dead insects to feed their offspring, meaning they prevent the bodies from piling up—like a cleaning service. Unfortunately, their scavenging habits and love of sugar puts them in close proximity to people, which almost never ends well for the yellowjacket or the person.”

To get an idea just how useful wasps are, University College London (2021) looked at the impact insects had with their ability to biocontrol pests of crops.  They found that  “predation by insects is worth at least $416 billion (US) per year worldwide. However, this figure does not even account for the impact wasps have.  “The review highlights how wasps’ role as predators makes them valuable for agriculture. Wasps regulate populations of arthropods, like aphids and caterpillars that damage crops. Solitary wasp species tend to be specialists, which may be suited to managing a specific pest, while social wasps are generalist predators, and may be especially useful as a local source of control for a range of crop-eating pests.”  This shows just how useful wasps are in our ecosystem and that, without them, many food crops would be destroyed by plagues of pests. 
The researchers also looked at future uses of wasps regarding agriculture.  They believe that “wasps could be used as sustainable forms of pest control in developing countries, especially tropical ones, where farmers could bring in populations of a local wasp species with minimal risk to the natural environment. Professor Sumner and colleagues recently published a study, finding that common wasp species are effective predators that can manage pests on two high-value crops, maize and sugarcane, in Brazil.” (ULC, 2021)

Wasps and Yeast

Hadley (2020) also points to research by the University of Florence.   They recently discovered another important role of both hornets and paper wasps: “They carry yeast cells in their guts.  Yeast is an essential ingredient in making bread, beer, and wine, but we know very little about how yeast lives in the wild. The researchers found that wasps and hornets feed on late-season grapes, which are rich in wild yeast. The yeast survives the winter in the stomachs of hibernating queen wasps and is passed on to their offspring when they regurgitate food for their young. The new generation of wasps then carries the yeast back to the next season's grapes.” Wine, anyone?

 

Medical Miracles?

As if this wasn’t enough, wasps may also hold the key to some medical problems and may provide a cure for some severe illnesses.  According to ULC (2021), wasps’ venom and saliva have antibiotic properties.  What is more, “yellow-jacket wasp venom has shown promise in treating cancer.” 

 

Some final thoughts

It’s hard to break years, decades, even centuries’ worth of learnt beliefs and perceptions of nature’s creatures.  We’ve been told that wasps and bad and useless, and met them with contempt and disregard.  Now is the time to rethink, relearn and understand just how valuable those little flying insects are.  If we’re not careful, they’ll soon be threatened by extinction.  And a world without wasps is not one we want to imagine. 
So, let them live.  Respect them.  Care for them and lend them a helping hand.  We need wasps in our future.

And finally: Here’s a little video which shows what would happen if wasps were to disappear:

Why wasps are just as wonderful as bees - BBC Ideas

References:

 

BBC News. 2020. Why wasps are just as wonderful as bees. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/ideas/videos/what-if-all-the-wasps-disappeared/p085ltfr Accessed 16th November 2021

 

Briggs, H. 2019 Scientists: Why we should appreciate wasps. Available at: Scientists: Why we should appreciate wasps - BBC News (Accessed 14th November 2021)

 

Hart, A. (Prof). 2017. What’s really the point of wasps? Available at: What's really the point of wasps? - BBC News. Accessed 16th November 2021

 

Hadley, D. 2020. What do wasps do and why do we need them? Available at: What Do Wasps Do, And Why Do We Need Them? (thoughtco.com). Accessed 16th November 2021

 

University College London. 2021. Wasps are valuable for ecosystems, economy and humans. Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2021/apr/wasps-are-valuable-ecosystems-economy-and-human-health-just-bees (Accessed 16th November 2021)