Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps

Dedication

To my parents, Frances and Graham,

for their endless love and support

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Part One: The Problem with Wasps

Part Two: The Obsessions of Wasp Whisperers

Part Three: How to Have a Social Life

Part Four: Playing the Game

Part Five: Dinner with Aristotle

Part Six: Nature’s Pest Controllers

Part Seven: The Secret Pollinators

Last Word: A Future with Wasps

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

Photo Section

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

. . . and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.

Dylan Thomas (1952)

When I was three years old, I lived in a tiny, forgotten village in West Wales called Cribyn. It’s easily missed on the map. But at the time it was my whole world.

I remember the garden. A very damp garden. It was Wales. It may have been due to the dampness, or perhaps my father’s home brew that bubbled away on the patio, but the garden had a lot of slugs. To be honest, my memories of it are hazy but I remember the slugs because one day I ate one. My mother was horrified. After all, slugs, she told me, are revolting creatures.

People pour salt on slugs when they leave their silvery trails on patios or lettuces, without considering how nature needs them or what they do for us behind the scenes. People throw other kinds of chemicals at other bits of nature they don’t like. My toddler-self wondered why people didn’t just eat the bits of nature they wanted to get rid of.

This book is not about slugs. I don’t really have much time for slugs anymore. But maybe, deep down, the reason I am so fascinated with wasps is because of the slug, the one I ate in a lost village, in damp, beautiful Wales.

You see, people hate slugs, just as they hate spiders, worms, leeches, ticks. And wasps. Maybe my garden slug incident explains why I graduated so rapidly from an interest in slugs to birds, bypassing the other creepy-crawlies that the world had taught me not to like. This included wasps. I didn’t like wasps at all. When wasps came near, I flapped. I screamed. I swatted. I ran. Just like you, perhaps. Ever since you were three.

Then one day I found myself lying flat on the jungle floor of a Malaysian rainforest with a wasp nest dangling above my nose. For my PhD, I had painted each wasp with a few spots so that I could distinguish one from another. I’d been watching my painted insects for several weeks: I saw them being born, I saw them fight for a place in society, I saw some rise to motherhood and others submit to a life of hard labour. Then it was done: in my wonder at their doings, I fell in love with the least-loved, most enigmatic of insects – the wasp.

Twenty-five years later, I am still asking questions about wasps, but (lamentably) mostly from my office at University College London, rather than a tropical jungle. The deeper I wonder, the more questions (and wasps) I find: why are there so many species? Why are wasps so diverse in form and function? How are they able to manipulate other insects so effectively? Why have wasps evolved societies so complex that they make ours look like childhood role play? Why are we not better harnessing the services of wasps as vital predators of pests?

When I explain to strangers what I do for a living, they ask a different set of questions: why should we care about wasps? What do they do for us? Why do you study them? Why don’t you study something more useful . . . like bees? I explain that wasps are nature’s pest controllers, that they are probably more diverse even than beetles, that a world without wasps would be just as devastating as a world without bees, or beetles, or butterflies. My new friends shuffle with all the grace of a plastic bag at an organic food market. Yet on hearing the ‘bee’ word, they spot their chance of recovery and seize it to tell me how much they love bees. Safe territory. Wasps are forgotten, slipped into the recycling bin like unopened junk mail; my friends are relieved that the (wasp) conversation is over.

I can’t blame them. Bees are good, and cute and useful. We love them, and rightly so. However, there are a mere 22,000 species of bees and there are over 100,000 species of wasps. Still, it is almost impossible to walk into a bookshop these days and not bump into a beautiful book about bees. Written by journalist, science writer or academic, there is a bee book to set any flavour of consumer buzzing. These tomes bounce off the media storms that have been generated by a burgeoning body of new science on the importance of bees, the plight of bee populations and the catastrophic effects that their decline is likely to have on our health, food security and happiness. It is not surprising that readers have an insatiable appetite for books about these adorable, helpful organisms.

In stark contrast to bees, wasps are depicted as the gangsters of the insect world; winged thugs; inspiration for horror movies; the ‘sting’ in the tale of thriller novels; conduits of biblical punishment. Shakespeare, Pope Francis, Aristotle, even Darwin struggled to speak favourably of wasps, and questioned the purpose of their existence. Scientists have been victims of this culture too, shunning wasps as research subjects despite the endless forms of these creatures that remain to be studied. It seems the root of this hatred is the wasp’s sting,* its eagerness to keep on stinging,* and its apparent pointlessness in the natural world.

For most people, wasps are the yin (dark side) to the yang (sunny side) of the bee. This analogy from Chinese philosophy is appropriate on many levels: it describes our feelings about wasps (negative) and bees (positive). It articulates our perceptions of how useful wasps (not useful) and bees (very useful) are to us. It also describes the complementary roles in ecosystems of bees (as pollinators) and wasps (as predators). The importance of wasps as predators has gone largely unappreciated, and this is one of my reasons for writing this book. Wasps are important in ecological and economic terms; they have as many ‘sunny sides’ as bees do, with their fascinating social behaviour, their beauty and diversity, and their evolutionary importance as the ancestral root to all bees and ants.

Wasps hold hidden treasures of relevance to our own culture, survival, health and happiness. The ‘bee story’ was written by wasps before bees even evolved, and before wasps had shown humans how to make the paper on which the first bee book could be written. This book aims to balance the scales, to pull up a chair for wasps at the nature table of appreciation, and to transform the macabre repulsion that people have for wasps into the fascination and appreciation that wasps deserve.

If you love bees, this book may bring uncomfortable news: bees are simply wasps that have forgotten how to hunt. The ‘original bee’ was a solitary wasp who turned vegetarian, replacing the protein of meat with the protein of plants – pollen – and so kick-starting the bees’ long co-evolutionary relationship with plants. This evolutionary shift in diet was not the birth of ‘usefulness’, though: the ancestor of the ‘original bee’ had proved equally important in the environment as a master regulator of other insect and arthropod populations.

Wasps are also ancestors of ants: the first ant was a wasp that lost its wings. Today’s solitary hunting wasps provide us with glimpses of what the original bee and original ant would have been like. Wasps are a time machine, ready to reveal the evolutionary secrets of one of the most diverse animal groups and some of the most complex societies on earth. While there are at least 100,000 known species of wasps, there are probably several million undescribed species waiting in the taxonomists’ wings, and still their diversity has gone largely overlooked. The label of ‘wasp’ sits squarely under the shadow of the yellow-and-black-striped picnic-botherer of most people’s imagination. New data and techniques in molecular biology (genome sequencing) that permit fine-scale dissection of evolutionary relationships (phylogenies) have revolutionised species detection. It is becoming clear that wasps rival beetles not just in the number of species, but also in diversity of form and function. This science is making us think again about which of the insect groups really do run the planet.

My view of wasps was changed on that damp forest floor of a Malaysian jungle by the drama of their societies. Despite their little brains, wasps live out soap-opera-style existences that sweep our television equivalents into the wings. Divisions of labour, rebellions and policing, monarchies, leadership contests, ASBOs, negotiators, social parasites, undertakers . . . wasp societies have it all. These citadels are products of evolution, and understanding why and how they evolved has been the driving force of my personal journey into the enigmatic world of wasps. Wasp social behaviour is genuinely fascinating, perhaps because of the parallels they share with our own social lives.

The most widely recognised bee is the western honeybee – Apis mellifera. Thanks to a millennia-long, close cultural relationship between human and honeybee, we know a lot about the behaviour and life history of this species, and how to harness its ‘usefulness’ as pollinator and supplier of nutrition. By contrast, wasps have been scholastically neglected, and consequently our understanding of these remarkable creatures is lamentable. A good example is the honeybee of the wasp world – the yellowjacket wasp, Vespula vulgaris – which is simultaneously the most recognised wasp and the most despised insect across the globe. Over 150 years ago, Sir John Lubbock (1st Baron Avebury, and Charles Darwin’s neighbour) suggested that yellowjackets might be cleverer than honeybees. Astonishingly, we still know very little about the cognitive abilities of wasps but they are likely to be as impressive as those of bees, if not more so, as their prey is harder to catch. Insights into the remarkable social behaviours of the yellowjacket will surprise you.

Globally, bees are worth around $350 billion annually as crop pollinators. What’s the economic value of wasps? We don’t know. But we do know that wasps are voracious predators. They eat a wide range of insects (and a lot of them), many of which will be pest species in agricultural landscapes. Some wasps are already valued for this role, such as parasitoid wasps, which have been exploited as agents of biocontrol across the globe. You might even have bought some yourself, to rid your house of the dreaded clothes moth.

But the insects that most people identify as wasps – the hunting wasps, like the picnic-bothering yellowjacket Vespula – are not currently valued for their pest-controlling power. Scientists have not calculated how many tonnes of insect pests wasps remove from agricultural landscapes, nor the extent to which wasps may offer an economically viable alternative to chemicals as biocontrol agents. It is only now that we are beginning to appreciate the breadth of natural capital that is wrapped up in our planet’s biodiversity. Unwrap the wasps, and you may be amazed by their potential as biocontrol agents within a sustainable global agriculture that relies less on chemicals.

Some of evolution’s most mind-blowing stories are of wasps as pollinators. Take fig wasps, for example: without these minuscule insects there would be no figs (or figgy pudding!). Some orchids have evolved to mimic (chemically and physically) a rather sexy-looking female wasp. The orchid doesn’t just look like a sexy female, it smells like one. Male wasps swoon helplessly from one flower to another, casually spreading orchid pollen along with their own fair seeds. Other orchids release a floral smell, mimicking that of a plant being attacked by juicy caterpillars. Greedy yellowjacket wasps detect these cues and come flocking in hope of picking off a tasty protein punch, only to be disappointed and inadvertently smothered with pollen. Apart from these extraordinary tales, wasp pollination is a much neglected subject. And this is despite there being an entire subfamily of wasps that feed only on pollen. Even their name – ‘pollen wasps’ – has failed to divert the interests of pollination biologists from the bee, fly and butterfly mainstays.

At the pearly gates of invertebrate heaven, how might the good deeds of wasps stack up against those of bees, beetles, butterflies or even slugs? Wasps are exquisitely endless in form and function, and (probably) more species-rich than any other animal group. Their behaviours are secretive, surprising and mysterious; their societies are equally as wondrous as those of the much-loved honeybee. Wasps are stewards of our ecosystems as pest controllers, pollinators, seed-dispersers and guardians of micro-organisms. They may bring sumptuous feasts to our tables, could be measuring sticks of planetary health, and they are medicine cabinets waiting to be discovered.

My hope is that this book will unravel the mysteries of wasps; that it will challenge your perceptions of them; that it will give you reasons to value them; and that it will stir new heraldry for these undiscovered gems of nature. In 1952, the poet Dylan Thomas recounted, with the confusing simplicity of childhood, his memories of Christmases in Wales. Among pointless presents of perceived importance were ‘books that told me everything about the wasp, except why’.

This is the book that will tell you why wasps – the most enigmatic of insects – deserve a closer look.

Part One

The Problem with Wasps

If I be waspish, best beware my sting.

William Shakespeare,

The Taming of the Shrew

Prelude

The problem with wasps is people. We are often rather ignorant. It’s not our fault: there is a lot to take in and understand about this rich, bountiful planet. We are easily distracted; we make rash judgements based on limited experiences. We are simply trying to make sense of a complicated world. We are curious creatures, knowledge-thirsty. But a little knowledge is dangerous.

Take me and my slug. When I was three, society taught me that slugs are revolting; I extrapolated that negative, mucosal, social construct to all invertebrates.

Until I was rescued by wasps.

Part 1 of this book may surprise you. I hope it does. Please read it all to the end, otherwise you might find the rest of the book too unbelievable.

I

‘This is probably the weirdest phone call you’ll ever have,’ said Amit. ‘I want the victim’s sewn-up eyelids to undulate, squirm and bulge. And then big, gruesome wasps to burst out!’ He continued, elated, ‘Is this even possible? What wasp? How?’

Thriller writer Amit Dhand was surprised to hear that of course there was a wasp that could do this. With so many species, there was going to be something that evolution had cooked up to fit his script. Perhaps a spider-hunting wasp, something like a pompilid, and probably a tropical species, as they tend to be the biggest ones.

‘But how will they breathe under the sealed eyelid?’ he asked. ‘What will they eat?’ Amit was anxious. Sceptical.

The eye could be a source of nutrition for a developing wasp, I explained. As with its natural protein source – paralysed spider prey – the pompilid wasp could lay an egg on the eye; the egg would hatch into a larva, which would feed off the eye tissue, before pupating (like a caterpillar chrysalis) and finally emerging as an adult. If wasp biology was not quite sensational enough for Amit’s readers, perhaps some of the colloquial names for pompilids might seal the bid – they’ve been called throat locker, horse-killer. Amit couldn’t quite believe that such a solution for his gruesome storyline existed (albeit with a little artistic licence). What he had been asking for wasn’t science fiction – it was evolution.

In fact, Amit could have chosen any one of some 5,000 species of pompilid wasps to star in his thriller. Some of the tropical species are the size of a small bird – you can hear them coming, their wings helicopter-humming. They have one of the most potent insect venoms and are able to paralyse the largest tarantulas. Their speed, life-freezing venom and skittish behaviour enable them to capture spiders several times their own size. A single sting renders their prey as putty in the mother wasp’s mandibles; then she will drag the spider into a pre-prepared lair and lay a single egg on it. By the time the baby wasp is munching through its personal living larder, its mother has long since moved on to hunting and provisioning more offspring. It’s a military operation, with no room for nurture.

Amit Dhand is not the first writer to have capitalised on our gruesome fascination with the behaviour of wasps. They feature in dozens of novels. Agatha Christie uses wasp poison as a murder weapon in her 1928 crime story, ‘Wasps’ Nest’. Eric Frank Russell’s 1957 science fiction novel Wasp plays on the panic and damage that a wasp can cause in an enclosed space, to unfold a story about how a small, insignificant infiltrator from earth can destroy an alien civilisation. Russell’s book has been described as a terrorists’ handbook, and has disturbing parallels with the 9/11 attacks on America over 40 years later. Even Shakespeare teaches us to beware of waspish behaviour (mostly from women).

Expression of the fear, revulsion and horror we feel in the company of wasps goes back even earlier to some of the oldest literature. Almost 2,500 years ago, Aristophanes, the ‘Father of Comedy’, wrote The Wasps (422 BC), a work considered to be one of the greatest comedies of all time, named after the jurors in the play who cause trouble by inflicting a collective power over society. Wasps feature in religion too. God sends swarms of wasps to punish unbelievers in at least three books of the Bible. He was quite specific about the kind of wasp He summoned – it was always a hornet. Unfortunately, hornets don’t often swarm. Maybe He got them confused with honeybees. Following in these biblical footsteps, Pope Paul IV was pope for just four years (between 1555 and 1559), but he squeezed in a holy hit at the wasp: ‘Anger is as a stone cast at a wasps’ nest.’ This is indeed an accurate description of what happens if you throw stones at wasp nests (by accident or intentionally), but the same insect-fuelled anger would be elicited if you threw a stone at a bees’ nest.

A Senegalese Creation story depicts wasps as the ‘Eve’ among animals. All the animals are asked to look away while God continues his work of creating the world, but the wasp can’t resist taking a forbidden peek. To punish the creature, God pinches her around the waist: ‘He squeezed the body at the waist so thin, so that it could neither hold a pregnancy nor pass an offspring . . . Henceforth the wasp was doomed to never know the joys of birth.’

The ‘wasp waist’ is indeed a signature trait of wasps, and one that distinguishes them from their cousins, the bees. This Creation story goes on to tell us that the wasp has ‘divine know-how’ and that it constructs a nest into which it places the worm-like larvae of other insects, and from these it rears its offspring. That is a pretty accurate description of the life cycle of many solitary wasps, who provision their nests with other insects, often ‘worm-like’ caterpillars. Potter wasps are especially fond of nesting on the mud-hut walls of rural Africa: this Creation story was clearly informed by the observations of early entomologists.

Such literary references – historic and contemporary – have capitalised on our generic, cultural fear of wasps and our stereotypically (negative) emotional response to them. The wasp has long been a powerful metaphor for an evil, devious character who does no good. While reinforcing a negative image of wasps, this has also perpetuated many misunderstandings about their life history and behaviour. The same ingrained cultural sentiment has spilled onto the silver screen too. The 1959 film The Wasp Woman topped the bill from a cultural and scientific perspective: a woman overdoses on an anti-ageing formula made from the royal jelly of a queen wasp, and at night she transforms into a murderous ‘wasp-like’ creature who devours (mostly) men.

The Wasp Woman is gloriously cardboard in appearance and plot. But its creators clearly had an idea of what type of wasp their lovely screen star should emulate (that is, a yellowjacket ‘picnic’ wasp) and they appear to have understood that the insect’s appearance and behaviour can be manipulated through its secretions and nutrition. Royal jelly (often described less grandly as ‘white snot’) is produced from the glands of honeybee workers and fed to all of the brood when they are young, but it is only fed to those older larvae that are destined to be new queens. It is the honeybee’s secret ingredient that catapults a larva down a queen’s (not worker’s) developmental pathway. What a great biology-inspired spin for a film about a Wasp Woman whose behaviour is altered by this magic jelly.

Unfortunately, wasps don’t make royal jelly. In fact, we have very little idea how queen and worker castes are determined in wasps. There is probably some kind of cue that triggers the different developmental pathways and it is likely to be a nutritional one, as in the honeybee; but so far no one has looked at what this could be in yellowjacket wasps. The closest thing to royal jelly known in wasps is an abdominal substance produced by an unusual group found in Southeast Asia, the Stenogastrinae, or hover wasps. They are delightfully gentle, delicate creatures and you’d be excused for mistaking them for hoverflies, for that is what they do a lot: they hover. They also sport an exceedingly long and slender wasp waist, making them one of the wasp supermodels; and (like supermodels) they have a number of behavioural peculiarities, one of which is their egg-laying behaviour.

‘Normal’ wasps (like a yellowjacket or solitary hunting wasp) lay their egg directly onto the intended substrate (which could be a spider, caterpillar or the bottom of a cell). Not so for the hover wasp. When a hover wasp female is ready to lay an egg, she performs an enviable yoga move that unites her bottom with her mouth parts; a sticky gelatinous material is squeezed out of her abdomen, which she clasps in her mandibles. A second yoga move (that involves rotating her sting up at right angles) deposits an egg onto this blob. The ‘egg and blob’ unit is then carefully glued to the bottom of an empty cell.

We don’t really know what is so special about this abdominal substance and why hover wasps do things differently to all the other wasps, but it probably has nutritional functions for the brood, as well as forming a secure base on which to anchor a precious egg. Sticking with the royal jelly theme, therefore, a film entitled The Bee Woman would have been scientifically sounder but lack that lustrous alliteration, and was incompatible with the lead role transforming into a man-eating woman (bees being strict vegetarians). With such divisive messages bestowed on wasps via literature, art and film, it is hardly surprising that they are perceived with great hostility by most people.

The most famous literary mention of wasps is probably Iain Banks’s 1984 novel The Wasp Factory, which isn’t about wasps except for a couple of passages about a disturbed teenager taunting captive wasps in the attic of his estranged family’s home. Banks is one of my favourite authors, yet there are only so many copies of The Wasp Factory that I can keep on my bookshelf. It is one of those books that I keep being given by people who have not actually read it themselves, but they know I study wasps and assume that I need a copy.

The Wasp Factory was Banks’s first novel and was designed to get him some attention. It did. The book’s protagonist is a psychopathic multi-murderer, unknowingly transgender teenager called Frank Cauldhame who spends his time carrying out ritual killings of animals on a remote Scottish island, loosely based on the Isle of Islay. It is gruesomely compelling and a satisfying read if you’re into full-spectrum societal depravity, but it’s disappointing if you’re hoping for insights into wasps. The novel’s title refers to a kind of mini-beast torture chamber that Frank has built and hidden away in the attic. He uses it to subject yellowjacket wasps to unpleasant ‘choice-chambers’ of doom: a Russian roulette of options to choose from. How shall the wasp die today? Burned alive, crushed or drowned in urine? The wasps are just a sideshow to the storyline really – one of many heinous outlets for Frank’s revenge on his anguished and disturbed life. Pitched alongside animal sacrifices, child murders and the maggot-riddled brains of a baby, the prolonged torture and untimely death of a few wasps is probably the least disturbing part of the book.

Imagine it wasn’t wasps that Frank put in his torture factory, but bees: imagine Frank snatching poor hard-working honeybees from their daily labour of floral love and subjecting them to the same hideous ends that his wasps suffer. Ah-ha! Now the emotions tumble: ‘That poor bee! What an evil, evil boy!’ Why do you feel this way about bees but not wasps? It may be because you know how useful and important bees are for pollination, or perhaps it’s the special relationship we humans have with the honeybee: our favourite domesticated insect, provider of honey and exhibitor of social pleasantries that we can relate to.

After over 20 years of studying wasps, I had grown weary of the universal opinions of people about how they loathe wasps. I felt sure that there were people out there like me, who appreciated wasps for what they do and who didn’t see why wasps should be treated differently to bees. With two fellow wasp-fanatics, Alessandro Cini and Georgia Law, I concocted a plan to get to the bottom of why people felt such repugnance about wasps. We used the power of the internet to probe the emotions of the public towards wasps and bees, and to examine their understanding of what these insects do in ecosystems.

The results proved good news for bees: from a pool of 750 people, almost all respondents scored bees as highly positive on a scale of emotions, indicating that they were big fans. Our respondents used productive, positive words like ‘honey’, ‘buzz’ and ‘flowers’ to describe them. People also scored bees very highly on their ‘value’ to the environment as pollinators, but gave them very low scores for their contributions as predators. This was great news: the public have an excellent knowledge of what bees do (and don’t do) in nature.

What about wasps? My worst fears were confirmed. The emotional responses to wasps were a mirror image to those for bees: almost everyone rated wasps with a negative ‘emotion score’. Overwhelmingly, people used the same single word to describe wasps: STING! But, most concerning, people had no idea what wasps do in ecosystems. It was as if our respondents had plucked their scores from a lucky dip, blindfolded: the ratings they gave wasps for both ‘predation’ and ‘pollination’ were no different from random.

Everything made sense: people felt negatively about wasps because wasps sting and because wasps are perceived as serving no useful role in the environment. Of course, bees sting too, and this was acknowledged in the data: ‘sting’ was also among the commonest words used to describe bees. But people appreciate bees despite their sting because of their good services in the environment – as pollinators. A bit of pain is bearable if there’s a hidden benefit. People also seemed to value bees, irrespective of their general interest in nature. Wasps, conversely, were more likely to be appreciated by people with a strong general interest in nature.

Could it be that people only know a lot about bees because they hear a lot about them, everywhere they go? Bees are in the media throughout the year, from appeals like ‘Save the bees!’ to ‘Bee-bombs for your garden!’ and ‘Bee friendly, plant some flowers’. Perhaps this is also why people seek out information about bees more than they do for wasps: over the last five years, people have searched for ‘bees’ on the internet six times more often than they have for ‘wasps’. Most of the searches for ‘wasps’ came from people wanting to get rid of them. Wasps get little coverage in the news. In the UK, they are lucky to make the headlines in the late summer if there’s a shortage of ‘real news’ stories. Such stories are largely tabloid-hyped reports of ‘killer wasps’ and invasive species.

The arrival of the yellow-legged Asian hornet (Vespa velutina) in Europe in 2004, for example, refuelled the public’s fear of wasps. This species is slightly smaller than the native European hornet (Vespa crabro), but it is a voracious predator. We have reasons to be concerned: it is spreading through Europe at around 100 kilometres per year, preying on native pollinators as well as domesticated honeybees. Media coverage of invasive species like the yellow-legged Asian hornet is extremely valuable in raising vigilance; having several million pairs of eyes and ears in citizens across a nation is priceless for the environment agencies trying to keep invaders under control.

Unfortunately, these news reports have often been coupled with scaremongering and misinformation: why pick a photo of an inconspicuous, smallish dark hornet (which happens to be what Vespa velutina is) to illustrate your tabloid article on killer wasps when you can pick a photo of Vespa mandarinia – the world’s largest hornet with a wing span of 7.5 centimetres and a 6-millimetre sting which packs a venomous cocktail of compounds including several neurotoxins. This hornet flies at 40 kilometres per hour and dons a suitably scary bright-yellow face. Even I would think twice about approaching Vespa mandarinia (although apparently you would need around 58 stings at once for the neurotoxins to kill you). But, dear tabloids, please get your facts right: this is not the hornet that is invading Europe (although it is invading the USA, but that’s another story). The media-fuelled juxtaposition of monster-wasp stories against industrious-bee stories is not helpful.

Words used by the public to describe wasps (top) and bees (bottom).

The bigger the type, the more people who used that word.

It’s hard to believe now, but several decades ago a genuinely scary bee story dominated the headlines, after a hybrid of the western honeybee Apis mellifera mellifera and the East African lowlands subspecies Apis mellifera scutellata was produced and released to the wild by accident. Brazilian biologist Warwick Kerr had been attempting to breed a strain of honeybee that would produce more honey and be more resilient to tropical environments. Disaster struck when several colonies of his Africanised hybrids escaped from apiaries in São Paulo State. The bees quickly dispersed and crossbred with the local western honeybee colonies. These insects became known as African killer bees, or Africanised bees.

Over time this vigorous hybrid has spread throughout the Americas. Kerr’s strain is indeed highly productive: good news for beekeeping economics. However, it outcompetes the mild-tempered western honeybee simply by being better at harvesting pollen, having a higher reproductive rate and a stronger work ethic (they forage in weather that see Apis mellifera hide in their hive). They are also more aggressive and are more liable to swarm, making them harder for beekeepers to work with and more likely to kill people. But that’s old news now – beekeepers have adapted their management techniques and actively prefer to keep the Africanised bees over their western counterparts because of the higher productivity. The world has moved on since the 1970s. Scary bee stories no longer sell copy, while ‘blessed bee’ stories and ‘evil wasp’ stories do.

We have learned to detest wasps because we’ve been taught to do so by our families, educators, media, literature and entertainment. It’s not our fault – we are products of our local cultures. Science must shoulder its share of responsibility for this. Over the last 30 years, there have been three times more scientific papers published on bees than on wasps, and conference talks on bees outnumber those on wasps four to one. The bee-bias in research has become more extreme over recent years, fuelled by large investments by governments into pollinator research, driven by our own self-servicing interests. In a world without pollinators, we go hungry.

But funding streams cannot shoulder the blame entirely for science’s neglect of wasps. Some of our greatest minds have subtly sowed the seeds to promote scientific distance from them. It was parasitic Ichneumonid wasps that caused Charles Darwin to question the omnipotence of God and the story of Creation. In a letter to the botanist Asa Gray in 1860, Darwin wrote: ‘I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars.’

Even contemporary wasp scientists concede the social stigma carried by wasps. American scientist Mary Jane West-Eberhard has devoted her life to studying wasps, but admits ‘they terrorize housewives, ruin picnics, and build large aerial nests that challenge fleet-footed stone-throwing boys the world over.’ William D. Hamilton, a scientist who has had the most profound influence on our understanding of social evolution, acknowledged that ‘Social wasps are amongst the least loved insects.’ And Phil Lester, a New Zealand scientist who has been working hard to control invasive wasps (kindly introduced by the British) in his homeland, embraced the hype of public revulsion to wasps and called his book on them The Vulgar Wasp.

When scientific champions of wasps are struggling to describe these insects as anything but the gangsters of the insect world, what hope do wasps have? What happens in a world without wasps? We don’t know for sure because we lack the basic science to tell us precisely what they do. But we know that wasps must be important for functioning ecosystems and a healthy planet. We know that they prey on the insects that would otherwise be a nuisance to us. In a world without wasps we would almost certainly need to use a lot of chemicals to keep other pests at bay. This, at least, is a good argument to forgive wasps for their sting just as we forgive bees.

It’s time to solve the enigma of these beautiful, diverse and mysterious creatures. Let’s give them a chance to prove themselves as worthy of our attention.

II

‘From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ I like to imagine that Darwin was admiring the beauty and wonder of wasps in his garden when he wrote these closing lines to his magnum opus On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, the book that revolutionised our understanding of life on earth. Many groups of organisms could be described as ‘endless’ in form, but natural selection has had an especially delicious time with wasps – teasing,