Nature Notebook

Social wasp © Wendy Carter

Wonderful Wasps

Wasps are almost universally disliked so discover more about their amazing lives and why it’s important to give them a bit of a love...

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Worcestershire Wildlife Trust @WorcsWT t worcestershirewildlifetrust G worcswildlifetrust.co.uk w There are over 7000 species of wasp in the UK but most of us only notice the bold black-and-yellow ones that buzz around our picnics in late summer. This is unfortunate because it gives all our amazing wasps a poor reputation. Take a closer look and you’ll discover that they’re important pollinators, essential top predators (social wasps catch an estimated 14kg of insects each year), incredible engineers and it’s thought that understanding more about the chemicals in their stings could help medical science.

The vast majority of the UK’s wasps are solitary. This means that mums provision their own eggs with food – depending on the species, this can be flies, spiders, weevils, aphids or other insects. These fly under our radar and our contact is most often with social wasps. There are nine species of social wasp in the UK and it’s their social nature that brings them into contact with us.

Ruled by a queen, female workers hunt for food to raise the young. They hunt for insects that we often think of as ‘pests’ – flies, weevils, caterpillars etc. I once watched a wasp deftly bite off the abdomen of a horsefly and fly back to the nest with it.

Wasps have incredibly thin waists, which means that adult wasps can’t eat solid food, so they live off nectar (hence the pollination) and sweet droplets produced by their larvae. Queens eventually produce new queens and males, which prompts the winding down of a nest and, when there are fewer larvae in the nest producing juicy liquid, adult wasps see our foods and fizzy drinks as a quick and easy carbs fix. Like bumblebees, only the new queens survive winter, ready to start a new nest somewhere else next year.

Have you ever seen a social wasp nest? Watch a wasp as it lands on a wooden shed or bench and you’ll see them rasping at the wood – they mix the wood shavings with saliva to produce a paste that is used to make the nest. Essentially, they engineer incredible architecture from papier mache! Solitary wasps dig chambers or construct elaborate pots and other structures from mud.

If sharing your outdoor food with wasps bothers you, consider placing fruit (if it’s going over a little, this is even better) somewhere nearby to attract them away from your picnic – perhaps the other end of a bench or a couple of metres away. If you have a nest on your property, you might not know about it until it starts to break down but once this happens (at any point from mid-August to late-September), you’re just a matter of weeks away from the wasps disappearing altogether.

Only female wasps (the workers) are able to sting and they’ll only do so if they feel you’re a threat so if there’s one buzzing around you, try to relax and stay calm. n