“What is the point of wasps?” I was asked the other day. Well, on fine and warm spring days, queen wasps have been very visible this year. At our place, as fast as I’ve got rid of one another seems to have turned up, and generally they don’t seem to have been very well-tempered. So wasps are, at the very least, irritating; but the fact is, we’d miss them if they weren’t there.
You may be surprised to know that there are some 9,000 different species of wasp in the UK. Many of these are very small, some are highly specialised, most don’t sting, and you probably wouldn’t recognise a lot of them as wasps at all. The ones that cause us so much trouble are the so-called paper wasps of the family Vespidae, social wasps that build large paper nests and have nasty stings. The largest of these is of course the hornet, not unknown in these parts but not all that often seen, either. We are close to the northern edge of its UK distribution, though hornets are beginning to spread further north. Hornets are fairly docile unless their nest is threatened, but do have a very nasty sting if riled, and an individual hornet or wasp can sting more than once. Their nests are in fact quite small, with maybe 300 inhabitants, whereas the nests of the two best known species of ‘typical’ wasps, the common wasp and the German wasp, can grow to accommodate more than 10,000 individual wasps.
The queen wasps that are so annoying just now have hibernated through the winter and are looking for nest sites. She’ll also be urgently looking for food to build up her strength, and wasps are in fact important early season pollinators of flowers. Once the first eggs have been laid, the queen, then the emerging workers, will take insects and caterpillars to feed the young. In warm weather it can take little more than a week for an egg to develop into the adult wasp, in cooler temperatures the process may take three to four weeks. Estimates vary as to how many insects a wasp colony will take in a season - suffice to say it’s a lot. So wasps can be a force for good in many ways - annoying though they can be, they are in fact the gardener’s friend.
Wasps are mostly a problem when the nest is threatened. Wasps follow a linear flight path in and out of the nest, and if you happen to be in the way, they don’t like it. They have excellent vision, and sudden panicked movements on our part make us seem larger and more threatening, increasing the chance of attack. When a wasp stings, a pheromone is released that encourages other wasps to join in, particularly when the nest itself is threatened. But badgers will often destroy wasp nests, feeding on the grubs and clearly able to ignore the stings of defending adults.
A number of species of wasp new to the UK have arrived in recent years, among them the median wasp which is larger than native species, and has something of a reputation for aggression. Thankfully, this wasp is still fairly rare. But wasps form part of a balanced ecosystem, and, if we are kind to them and respect their space, for the most part they will do more good than harm.
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