Don’t kill wasps – they keep our countryside beautiful

There can’t be many Telegraph readers who admire wasps in this long, hot summer, but I’m one of them – perhaps the only one. It’s therefore down to me to try to persuade all you vespaphobes why you should see these irascible insects from a different viewpoint and perhaps even learn to love them a bit.

Last Tuesday, my wife and I accompanied our grandchildren to Roarr! – a dinosaur park in rural mid-norfolk. In the blazing sunshine the thermometer hit 91F (33C) by late afternoon, but the intense heat was offset by the shade of magnificent ancient trees, among which stood breathtakingly realistic models of such childhood favourites as Triceratops and the Tyrannosaurus rex. Also very striking, despite their much smaller size, were the wasps – myriads of them, busily interfering with every picnic, ice-cream-covered toddler, and wasp-fearing adult.

“OK,” you might well say, “so you’re simply underlining why wasps are such a pest. Persuade me otherwise.”

Wasps are only an annoyance because of two things: their short tongues and their need for meat. True, they also have that painful sting which raises their level as a public nuisance significantly above that of those other detested insects – the mosquito and the housefly. But this carnivorous streak is a blessing in disguise.

In a good wasp year (good, that is, from my point of view) the wasps in just one square mile of England rid us of up to 200 million insect pests, by chewing them up into the consistency of a burger and flying them rapidly back to feed their thousands of ravenous young. The very first “fast food” in fact.

Their short mouthparts mean that wasps can’t probe for nectar in the majority of flowers, so, unlike bees, they often look for the sugar they need by raiding our picnic supplies. Yet again this apparent deficiency helps out in nature when wasps clean up the honeydew left on leaves by aphids, so reducing the chances of trees being attacked by mildew.

Then there’s the architecture of a wasps’ nest. A truly beautiful and intricate structure, it is made from a kind of paper (called carton), created by worker wasps using their strong mandibles to rasp wood off fenceposts and trees. Mixed with their own saliva, balls of this pulp are flown back to the nest and delicately applied to the growing construction, in different thicknesses and grades depending on the purpose. It was this ability of wasps to create tough sheets from wood that inspired the ancient Chinese to make the first paper some 4,000 years ago.

Finally, as an ecologist, I have a theory that wasps act as so-called keystone species and do an important job as regulators of whole ecosystems. Put simply, by virtue of their sheer numbers, wasps are unwittingly keeping our precious countryside in balance by “tidying it up”. The beautiful British landscape would be the poorer without them. Surely a little summer misery is a small price to pay?