WASPISH WOES

I wrote about the dangers of wasp stings recently, with more reference to disturbing a nest, but in the last week or two we have been more bothered in work by the cantankerous insular wasps that just make a nuisance of themselves whilst we eat or work. And of course they are the nation’s nemesis if you are trying to have a picnic or BBQ.

The reason that they become August’s Angst is down to their life cycle. Common wasps live socially like bees but, unlike honey bees, they haven’t evolved a way of storing food to allow the colony to survive the winter.

The only survivors are the young, fertilised queens who hibernate over winter.

They emerge in the spring to build little walnut sized nests where they lay around 20 eggs.

The queen feeds the larvae until around May, when they mature and become workers.

Then she focuses on more egg-laying and the workers get on with feeding them, enlarging the nest as they go along.

By this time of year the nest has grown to around a foot in diameter, often larger, and that nest can contains up to 10,000 wasps. Not helpful to know, is it?

Then, in August and September, a dramatic change takes place. The queen more or less stops her egg laying and no longer releases the pheromone that causes the workers to work.

That means that these workers are made redundant, so are left jobless and disorientated. Although adult wasps prey on insects, that “meat” is used to feed the larvae not themselves.

In their adult state wasps are not able to digest solid food and need sugary liquid to survive. So with no larvae to feed, they become uncontrollably and hungry and angry. My brother says I’m the same when I’m hungry – he calls it “hangry”.

Over-ripe fruit and fizzy drink are easy prey for wasps and towards the end of their brief lives, their hunger drives them to search for this easy sugar at exactly the time when we are indulging in it outdoors. The timing couldn’t be better for them or worse for us.

So the next time you get harassed by those angry solitary wasps remember that they are, in fact, jobless, homeless and about to die.

“Not soon enough”, says my unsympathetic brother.