August and September are – usually – the months when wasps buzz round our picnics and generally cause a nuisance. For those of us bothered by them, this year will come as something of a relief: because of a wet winter and spring numbers are much lower (a situation, worryingly, common to many insects).
Did you know , though, that there are over 3,000 species of wasps in the UK, including some as small as a pin head, and others with extremely long egg-laying tubes often longer than their bodies? Almost all of these are harmless solitary wasps which cause us no problems. Most of the ‘bothersome’ wasps are social wasps, which live together in large nest-building colonies.
A social wasp nest is made of wood fibres collected by the wasps, mixed with saliva to make a kind of papier-mache structure that is strong and durable, and a single nest can contain up to 10,000 wasps, mostly female workers. They catch insects to feed the larvae, and rely for food on a sticky, sugary liquid produced by them.
Only a few males and female potential queens are produced, and only fertilised queens survive over winter. When all of the larvae hatch and leave the nest, the worker wasps have only themselves to look after, so they fly around looking for sugary liquids – often beer! If you flap at or swat a wasp, it feels threatened and will defend itself. An inbuilt mechanism designed to defend the nest releases a pheromone that tells its worker mates that the nest is being attacked, and nearby wasps – quite naturally – fly in to help.
So, instead of flapping or swatting wasps, let them be. Better still, leave out a pot of sugary liquid to feed them. After the spring and summer they’ve had, they deserve it!
A final note: wasps are very beneficial. They eat around 14,000 tonnes of insects a year, which would otherwise damage plants and crops and, just like bees, are extremely effective pollinators helping our food crops grow.
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