In Dylan Thomas' 1952 prose work A Child's Christmas in Wales the poet mused on some of his Christmas presents. They included a book that told him "everything about the wasp, except why". Just fifty miles north of Swansea, where Thomas was born, in Lampeter he would, now, find someone who could answer the 'why' question and that person is Professor Seirian Sumner, an entomologist and behavioural ecologist at UCL who I was fortunate to spend a small part of yesterday evening listening to as she talked about wasps.
She knows A LOT about wasps and she was more than happy to share it with Skeptics in the Pub - Online in a talk she'd called Endless Forms:The Secret World Of Wasps. The same name as her book on the same subject. Starting with our old enemies, the yellowjackets. They're the ones that bother us in beer gardens and ruin our picnics, the gangsters of the insect world, and one of very few wasps that have a painful sting.
They have, according to the Prof, given other wasps a bad name and there are A LOT of other wasps. Over one and a half thousand species of social wasps and more than one hundred thousand species of solitary wasps.
Love them as she undoubtedly does now, Seirian Sumner didn't start out with a particular interest in wasps. Or even insects. But she was fascinated by animal behaviour so when she was given a chance to do a PhD on wasp behaviour she jumped at it. When she found herself in a tunnel full of hover wasps in South East Asia she wondered if she'd made the right decision.
That didn't last long and soon Sumner had become entranced. She observed that, in many ways, wasps behaved like the much loved meerkats. There's a division of labour in their society and some wasps even give up the ability to reproduce in order to help others bring up the infant wasps.
The South East Asian hover wasp, luckily for Sumner - who ended up getting stung several times, doesn't have a particularly painful sting. Justin O. Schmidt, the American entomologist who is either a genius or a lunatic and likely a bit of both, had himself stung by as many bees, wasps, and ants as possible and devised a sliding scale of pain, the Schmidt sting pain index, in which the sting of the hover wasp was described as merely "a fragrant tickle".
Which sounds almost pleasant. But wasps still get a bad rap. When people were asked for words they associated with bees the most popular was honey (with flowers, pollination, and buzz not far behind) but when asked about wasps the word that cropped up most was sting. Other words that came up included angry, annoying, and aggressive. Though 'stripes' featured with both bees and wasps.
Even God hated wasps. Specifically hornets who, in both the Exodus and Deuteronomy chapters of his boring book The Bible, were created by God specifically to punish non-believers. God really is a bit of a cunt.
Real people understood wasps a little better than fictitious deities. Aristotle, in his Historia de Animalibus, wrote about bees mainly but included wasps, yellowjackets specifically, whose colonies he'd observed. A Chinese eunuch watched wasps taking bark from trees and smoothing it down and hit upon the idea of inventing paper so, in some ways, wasps invented paper.
Generally though, wasps are underrated and understudied. At least that's the case now. A century or so back there was a small wave of what Professor Sumner calls 'wasp whisperers'. They included George and Elizabeth Peckham from Wisconsin who played an important role in getting evolution taught in (some) American schools and the French wasp whisperer Jean-Henri Fabre who found that bee wasps emitted toxic farts on their newborn which contained a form of immunisation against diseases so that the young bee wasps, who would never see their parents after birth, would be safer out in that big scary world.
The Peckham's studied the solitary digger wasp and found that when it hunts its prey in the form of caterpillars it doesn't, at first, kill it. It simply paralyses the caterpillar and then keeps it as a form of 'living larder'. Returning to its paralysed body every time it fancies a snack.
Other wasps zombify cockroaches and others hunt tarantulas. Without the wasps we'd have no bees or ants as both bees and ants evolved from wasps. That was just one of the reasons that Seirian Sumner felt we should celebrate the wasps. The Japanese do in the form of wasp festivals and, in Devon, a brewer has made a beer using wasp yeast. It gives you a nice buzz, apparently!
The image of the wasp, it seems, is slowly changing even if claims that wasps are essential pollinators of figs turned out not to be entirely true (I think I could live without figs, tbh) and another theory that wasp venom may include a cure for cancer seems highly speculative.
Wasps do, however, act as pest controllers. One hundred and fifty years ago, it was observed on a farm owned by a Sir T.Brisbane, that after all the wasps had been destroyed it only took two years before said farm became host to a plague of flies. Wasps regulate the number of flies (and aphids, spiders, caterpillars etc;) by killing lots of them.
But one thing a wasp finds even more irresistible than a lovely aphid and spider pie is a sexy orchid. Orchids have actually evolved to look and smell like female wasps and male wasps are sufficiently tricked and seduced by this that they end up depositing a dollop of pollen inside the orchid and thus pollinating it.
It was just one of many fascinating facts at yesterday's talk, a talk in which the Q&A went from Linnaeus to lettuces and from The Karate Kid to cabbages, and included two pieces of invaluable advice. If you don't want to be stung by a wasp then don't act like a badger and if you ever find yourself being chased by a wasp then stand on your head.
These lines were delivered with a smile and Professor Sumner even got her bunny rabbit out for us to admire at the end of a talk that sometimes a little bit silly but also very educational. The best type. For that I thank the compere Gerard Sorko, Skeptics in the Pub - Online, and Professor Seirian Sumner. But most of all a big thankyou to all the wasps out here. I know some of you, at least, will be reading this.
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