I don’t have a waspish attitude to the insects
WE PERSEVERED for a few days but the situation got worse. We hoped they would go away but, no, their number increased and they grew noisier and more agitated.
We spoke gently and wafted our hands but no avail.
At one point they had the audacity to come in through the bedroom window.
With great reluctance we contacted the wasp guy – the one you ‘phone when a swarm has made a nest with no intention of leaving any time soon.
He arrived on time, suitably attired and equipped for the job and told us it would only take about ten minutes. It did.
After the deed was done, he advised us to stay indoors for a while and to use the side door if we planned to go out. Initially the wasps were likely to be angry but quite soon after they would be gone.
By gone I assumed that he meant another location or gone in that final sense of no longer ever being wasps again in any recognisable shape or form.
In short, definitely dead wasps, never to be resuscitated again wasps, it’s all over now and thanks for the memory wasps.
I suspected he meant the latter. I had mixed feelings afterwards. Relief that they had gone and we were no longer under siege but a little sad that we had to resort to the nuclear option of the wasp guy and his executioner’s tools.
Wasps are a potential nuisance and in rare cases can be dangerous.
Their sting causes pain but overall they do more good than harm.
They protect gardens and crops by controlling pest insurgents such as whitefly in tomatoes and they polish off flies, caterpillars and beetle larvae.
They are experts in waste management, efficiently clearing up the earth beneath our feet and feeding off dead bugs.
They tend to be solitary creatures, quite happy to steal another wasp’s nest for the purpose of laying their own young.
One very naughty group amongst their number (and there are thirty thousand species of wasps), the aptly named Parasitoid, inject their eggs into a living host and feed off it until it shrivels and dies.
The great 19th century scientist, Charles Darwin, was so troubled by this practice that his Christian faith wobbled: in private correspondence he wrote ‘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.’
His remark raises interesting questions.
Would I like a wasp for a friend, a dinner date or as a partner for a trip to the movies?
Probably not, too noisy and pesky for my taste. I would also worry that when the lights went down in the cinema I might suddenly feel something inside my tummy preparing to eat me as its first course.
On the other hand, I would prefer not to swat wasps, wallop them with a rolled up newspaper or, until it’s absolutely necessary, call in the wasp guy.
They have their place in the ecological scheme of things and they can be creative as well as naughty and destructive.
Paper wasps can chew wood and turn it into pulp before moulding it into a beautiful nest.
They have been around an awfully long time, some two hundred and forty million years, somewhat longer than the time we have been in our new home, and ecologically speaking, our world would not be sustainable without them.
All things considered, quite a good score sheet. Darwin’s anxious comment remains pertinent however: just how much control does God exercise over the creation?
And can, what seems to us, the cruel behaviour of wasps or, for that matter, any other species, ever be regarded as part of divine design and intention rather than the natural outcome of the evolutionary processes that Darwin detailed so meticulously in The Origin of Species in 1859?