Seirian Sumner is a professor of behavioural ecology at University College London and the author of Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps.
The moment I became a cheerleader for wasps was when my six-year-old daughter came home from school and thrust a crumbled, well-thumbed piece of paper into my hands.
“Mummy, we learned about wasps at school today,” she told me. “Oh, how exciting!” I replied, and I really was excited – after all, I had been studying them for more than 15 years at that point, and here was an opportunity to connect with my daughter on the topic. “So what did you learn?” She held out the scrap of paper, but then stared at her feet. I unfolded the page, curious as to why she looked so anxious.
“Fill in the blanks,” the assignment’s instructions read. I scanned the page and its series of incomplete sentences with spaces where my daughter had submitted a suitable connecting word. “I feel hungry when I smell freshly baked bread.” “The girl ran up the road toward the ice-cream van.”
And then: “I hate wasps because they sting me in the summer.”
Of course, this was meant to be an exercise in literacy, not a lesson about wasps (or bread or ice cream). But to see proof that cultural indoctrination against the objects of my fascination begins so young – even at my own child’s school – was a punch in the stomach.
I decided I had to punch back.
Seirian Sumner, shown at home in Oxfordshire, is a professor of behavioural ecology who set out to learn more about our cultural preconceptions of wasps.Justin Griffiths-Williams
The first thing I had to come to terms with was that people really do hate wasps. There’s no denying it: The social norms (of Westerners, at least) tend toward a deep dislike of them.
In every talk I give about wasps, I ask audience members to share words they associate with them. Invariably, the associations that spring to mind include “sting,” “annoying,” “scary,” “evil,” “demons” – and, depending on the age group, a lot of rude words, too.
When I ask the same thing about bees, on the other hand, I get very different answers: “honey,” “cute,” “useful,” “pollination,” “summer.” Rarely do they include the word “sting” (or any epithets, for that matter). Yet both bees and wasps sting, and people are equally likely to become highly allergic to stings from either insect. Arguably, then, bees and wasps are equally threatening.
So why don’t people use the word “sting” to describe bees, too?
The reason is that people have a good understanding of what bees do – both for us, and for their ecosystems. They are essential pollinators in both farmed and natural ecosystems, and of course we keep honeybees for honey and wax; as semi-domesticated animals, they are the cow of the insect world. Even your average preschooler knows that bees are good, and has at least some idea of why. The same dynamic plays out in academia, too: for every scientific paper on the ecology of wasps, there are 40 such papers on bees, despite there being five times more species of wasps.
But bees also earned our empathy through massive and moneyed campaigns to save them from seemingly imminent demise. In the early 2000s, bee populations appeared to be declining significantly as fears grew about colony collapse disorder. Society’s focus landed on the honeybee, in particular, in large part because the species is so valued by humans and our food and agriculture industries. Companies and governments around the world enacted honeybee-protecting changes amid focused research, funding initiatives and wide-scale cultural popularization, including with bee merchandise – mugs, socks, furnishings, you name it. In short, it became easy to fall in love with bees.
Since then, the focus has shifted to include other pollinators whose populations are now more at risk, such as wild bees. This is good news for biodiversity – but we haven’t gone far enough. Instead, we’re continuing to cherry-pick which species we champion, largely on the basis of charisma, cuteness and the amount that we understand about them.
But the populations of many insect species are still plunging around the world. And we need to care just as much for harder-to-love ones if we hope to protect the interconnected communities that make up a healthy ecosystem. Like it or not, this includes wasps.
The gaps in our knowledge and empathy are why so many of us are not prepared to forgive wasps for the occasional sting, as we do bees. But if we continue to extend so little grace, that will only sting for us all, down the road.
Illustration by Alëna Skarina
So what do wasps do, and why should we care about them?
As apex predators in the insect world, wasps play critical roles in ecosystems – whether it’s your garden, a farm or a nature reserve – by keeping populations of other insects and arthropods in check. Flies, beetles, cockroaches, spiders, weevils, caterpillars – you name it, wasps hunt it. The yellowjacket wasp – the one that’s common in North America and bothers you in the summer when you’re enjoying a barbecue, an ice-cream cone or summer drink – is a poster child for natural pest control: a single colony removes around four kilograms of insect prey in a season. In a world without wasps, we would be inundated with unwanted arthropods – creepy-crawlies that we might dislike almost as much as wasps – and we’d be using much more damaging chemicals to keep these pests at bay.
Some wasps should also be commended as decomposers and recyclers. Social wasps, such as the Canadian yellowjacket wasp and some paper wasps from South America, will happily scavenge meat from carcasses. This might be a dead pigeon in your yard – wasps can strip a bird clean to the bone in a few hours – or it might be that sausage on your grill: It’s all protein to her, which she needs to feed the hungry growing brood back in the nest.
Wasps look for protein-rich meat, like this sliced ham, to feed their young. That might be annoying when the source is in your lunch, but it is a boon when the wasps clean away wild animal carcasses.Jens Kalaene/dpa-Zentralbild/ZB via Reuters Connect
This is why, if you have a wasp visiting your backyard get-together this summer, consider giving her an offering. Watch her carefully to see what she fancies, and then when she’s taken a hunk of it off to her nest, slice off a bit and leave it out for her, because it’s very likely she’ll come back for more. If she does, she’ll happily harvest from her own private picnic, and leave you in peace. Wasps aren’t as effective at recruiting their nestmates to a food source as bees. But the presence of a wasp on some prey or carrion will attract other wasps, so while an offering might lure in others, it will keep them away from you. Also, if a wasp is zigzagging in front of you, it’s not a threat; they’re not out to get you! They’re simply gathering information about you as a landmark to relocate their loot later on. Do your wasp a favour: Don’t flail your arms around and shout. If you do this, you’ll be behaving like a predator that she’s evolved to defend her nest against. You know how that ends.
But most crucially, and perhaps most surprisingly, is the fact that wasps are pollinators. A glimpse into their life cycle and biology helps make sense of this. Adult wasps are hunters, but the meat they hunt is intended only for the larvae; the adults themselves are vegetarians, and still need nutrition. They get this from flowers, by accessing nectar, just as bees and other insects do. Although most wasps don’t have specialist pollen-carrying morphology, such as the pollen baskets on the legs of many bees, pollen does get stuck on their bodies – wasps are hairier than you think – and they transfer it from flower to flower, just as bees do.
Wasp pollination is poorly studied, but one study revealed that Polistes paper wasps, which are common in parts of Canada, are just as effective in pollination as bumblebees. Another more recent study showed that wasps transport just as much pollen as bees, but that they occupy a different niche than them – meaning that the pollination services of wasps may actually complement what bees do, serving ecosystems in different but important ways. Many wasps are generalists, meaning that they visit lots of different types of flowers; they are less fussy than many bees, who have evolved to be specialist pollinators for specific plant species or flower types. Wasps, therefore, may be important backup pollinators, particularly in degraded environments that cannot support healthy bee populations.
There is a mismatch in what people broadly understand about wasps compared with what we know about other insects, even though there is so much that is fascinating about them. Which group of insects, for instance, has the most species? Most people will say beetles, and that may currently be the textbook answer; there are more than 350,000 described species of beetles. But we all suffer from beetle bias: they’re striking, with their iridescent bodies and multipronged horns, and showing off your prized beetle collection was top entertainment at high-society parties in the 1800s. But wasps are likely to supersede beetles as the most speciose and diverse of any insect group. There is a lot more to wasps than the picnic-bothering yellowjacket wasp: Currently, around 130,000 species of wasps have been described, but there are estimated to be five to 10 times more species yet to discover.
Around 70 per cent of wasps are parasitoids: They don’t have stingers, you’ve probably not even noticed them because most are minuscule, and they are used as biocontrol agents around the world. Parasitoids, which include the smallest insect in the world – the fairy fly, which is less than 0.15 millimetres long and only lives for a few days – lay eggs in live prey (a beetle, bug or fly) without the victim knowing. While the host carries on with its life, the wasp larva munches its way through the prey’s tissue, finally killing it when the wasp pupates.
It sounds gruesome – okay, it is a bit gruesome, so much so that parasitoid wasps provided Charles Darwin with arguments for his revolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection: “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created parasitic wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars,” he wrote. But how they do this is incredible: The wasp has to locate the prey, often by detecting a hidden larva inside a plant stem using its antenna; it then injects the egg into the prey, along with a venom cocktail that suppresses the immune system of the host, ensuring the baby wasp can feast happily. And as a pesticide-free way to combat crop pests, parasitoid wasps are gruesomely useful to us.
Trichogramma wasps are parasites that target the eggs of butterflies and moths, a valuable form of population control for pests that damage crops.BERTRAND NICOLAS/AFP/Getty Images
Most people are less familiar with parasitic wasps than their social cousins, like the ones that built this paper nest in Dartmouth, N.S.Sandor Fizli/Halifax Daily News via CP
If so many wasps don’t sting, why are we obsessed with the ones that do? It’s largely because the wasps we most come into contact with are the vespines: the large family of social wasps that include yellowjackets and hornets, which build big paper nests with an envelope around them, as well as paper wasps, which in Canada build small paper nests without an envelope. These insects live in societies, just like honeybees and bumblebees. They have a single queen, and a bunch of workers (all female) who raise the brood and maintain the nest. Their societies are every bit as awesome as those of social bees: They communicate with each other, passing on information adult-to-adult and brood-to-adult about the needs of the colony, about who’s the boss, and about who’s been misbehaving (ie. laying eggs when they shouldn’t). It’s a veritable soap opera, with a cast of evolutionary wonders. The notorious yellowjackets terrorizing your barbecue are superorganisms: no individual wasp can live alone; they fulfill different roles in the colony, functioning like different tissues in your body. Just as your liver can’t survive without your heart, and vice versa, a worker wasp cannot survive without the queen, and vice versa.
Working out how and why these superorganisms evolve has kept scientists (like Darwin and me!) busy for years. We now understand that altruistic behaviour evolves (in the worker caste) because they are able to pass on their genes by raising relatives. The queen and worker castes are produced from a shared genome by expressing different suites of genes, and the regulatory switch telling them which genes to express happens in response to the environment – either the food they’re fed as brood, or the social and/or ecological environment they experience as adults.
I still get a kick out of feeling the mood swing from wasp-negative to wasp-positive when I share these secrets with audiences. It doesn’t take much for people to look beyond the sting, and see that wasps are important, fascinating and diverse – even if some do grisly things. In my opinion, wasps match bees in terms of fascination by every measure – and by some, they leave bees in the ashes.
But it is frustrating that we need reasons to care about the facets of nature that are harder to appreciate, purely because we don’t know enough about them or their contributions to our lives. This is simply unacceptable during a global biodiversity crisis. We have a responsibility to care about every aspect of nature, and not just the iconic, cute species that we find easy to love or appreciate.
Organisms do not exist in isolation. They require an assemblage of other species around them – an ecosystem – to survive. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, it takes an ecosystem to save a species. Wasps are a critical part of every ecosystem, so we need to do our part in this global village and learn to love them.
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