Of summer picnic plagues... and a story with a sting in the tail

No insect is so instantly recognisable, none is so ubiquitous at this time of year – and, certainly, none is so hated. And this year, marked by a warm moist spring and summer after a pretty mild winter, has seen wasps in record numbers throughout the land.

This will have been evident to anyone who has thrown a barbecue, picnicked in a meadow or merely sat in the back garden with a Pimm’s and lemonade.

Wasps are detested, of course, because they sting and because very few people understand them.

Bees are industrious little things that bob around flowers, pollinate important crops, make luscious honey and – unless you actually threaten a hive – take no interest in people.

Wasps? We know not what they do, except being a perfect nuisance late in summer. Yet they play a vital role in our environment – and their life-cycle is really rather sad. A hive of bees can prosper for decades. A colony of wasps lasts for just one long summer, before collapsing in a sort of forlorn Götterdämmerung – and only the new, young queens survive the winter, hibernating in the tiny recesses of trees or walls.

The first wasps of the season you will see, usually in May, are almost always queens, and if you watch them closely you will see their chief interest is not in your lunch, but in wood.

She carries scrapings back and fore to her chosen dwelling spot – 70 per cent of wasps’ nests are underground, though trees, hedges or your attic will do – and builds her first and initially tiny nest, of exquisite hexagonal chambers, from this papier-mâché.

THERE is a lovely Scots word for a wasps’ nest – ‘byke’. Anyway, Her Majesty has thereafter but one job – to lay eggs. Her offspring, hatched in short order, have three. To feed her and their larval siblings; to enlarge the nest; and to guard it against all comers to the death.

Wasps are, in fact, carnivorous – and vital pest controllers in your garden. They take huge amounts of caterpillars, bugs and assorted little nasties and bear the munched-up wildlife back to the byke, where they tenderly feed the young.

The larvae, in tummy-tickled return, reward the adults with a sugary goo – that’s a key detail for later – and, in the course of their tireless hunting, wasps do some pollination.

Why things – from our point of view – go pear-shaped at this time of year is because a typical wasp colony has hit peak population and the queen is winding down her laying, just as we want to relax on the patio with an edifying book and a pint of cider.

So there are a great many seriously unemployed wasps and, with fewer and fewer larvae, and very little of that precious sugar fix just as your plums are ripening and, weather permitting, we all enjoy dining al fresco.

Bees have long tongues and can readily extract nectar from flowers. Wasps have short ones and the nectar in most flowers they find inaccessible. In addition, with keen sense and taste, they find our food and drink fascinating – and, indeed, us personally. We are, after all, made of meat.

Which is why the little horrors start whizzing around our

faces, we leap to our feet and flap wildly and, cross and alarmed, the varmint is likely to sting you.

Worse, a threatened wasp immediately secretes pheromones as a call for back-up. Within a minute or two, you will be of keen interest to dozens of distinctly ticked-off wasps, especially if (unbeknownst to you) the colony is fewer than 10ft away.

Worse, unlike a bee, a wasp can sting repeatedly and, every year on average, four or five British people die as a result of being stung by one or t’other. That, by November, most wasps will have died of starvation or perished in the first frost is scant consolation.

A wasp sting in the throat is particularly dangerous, which is why you should never drink anything out of a can and try to keep your mouth firmly shut when a wasp is whizzing around your head.

If you stay calm and resist the urge to flap and swat, a wasp is unlikely to sting you and, if it perches on your arm or knee, will fly away in short order if you simply ignore it.

Unless there is a very good reason – such as small children in a confined garden – you should resist the urge to destroy a wasp colony. Whether you do it yourself or call in a pest controller, blasting nasty pesticides into a byke will kill perfectly harmless things as well as wasps – and kill for years to come.

Besides, the colony will collapse anyway, as winter nears, and the derelict byke will deter other wasps from nesting there for a very long time.

If we are sensible, we can get along with wasps. In their own way – we have seven different species in Britain, most of which are solitary – they are rather beautiful.

Their vivid black-and-yellow livery is so unnerving it is mimicked by other species, such as the hoverfly.

WE use it ourselves for ‘Maximum Headroom’ signs – though you do wonder what, electorally, the alarming mix has over the years cost the SNP.

Wasps are co-operative and highly organised. They ignore us for most of the year and, daily, rid our gardens of aphids and pests and they are most impressive architects.

So fascinated was Agatha Christie by wasps that she wrote both a whodunnit and a play in which the insect featured. But she was beaten to the punch by Aristophanes, whose play, The Wasps, was

first staged in 422BC and is still regarded as one of the world’s greatest comedies.

Where wasps have proved catastrophic is in New Zealand, where they were accidentally introduced – probably a stowaway queen in an un-fumigated aircraft – shortly after the Second World War.

There are no other native social insects, no competitors, no predators and, with a mild climate and abundant food, they have done appalling damage, especially to wild birds robbed of the bugs on which they live and to rare species of butterfly.

The numbers are horrifying. It is said that in some parts of North Island the biomass of these wasps exceeds that of all other pests combined.

There are now localised ‘Wasp Wipeout’ programmes, though the odds against national eradication are forlorn.

Even here – where they are kept in ecological balance – this of all insects is the one we loathe. ‘We simply cannot find ourselves in these creatures,’ wrote anthropologist Hugh Raffles. ‘The more we look, the less we know. They are not like us. They do not respond to acts of love or mercy or remorse. It is worse than indifference.

‘It is a deep, dead space without reciprocity, recognition or redemption.’