It’s a summer weekend, and your neighbours discover a wasp nest in their loft. Horror strikes. Fearing for their safety (not to mention a planned barbecue), they reach for the phone and within 24 hours the nest has been nuked with toxic chemicals. Your neighbour hadn’t actually been bothered by a wasp all summer, but that fact didn’t occur to them.
Your neighbours are not nature-hating monsters. They are simply a product of their—our—culture. We are taught to rescue bees and fear wasps, even though both can sting. We know bees are important pollinators in natural and farmed habitats, and reports of declining numbers trigger alarm. Western environmentalists fear what the “Beepocalypse” could mean for humans—as do farmers in rural China, who are already hand-pollinating their fruit trees using paintbrushes, because of what pesticides are doing to bee populations.
No one worries about a “Waspocalypse.” In fact, many might welcome it. Admittedly, wasps look less cuddly and unlike honeybees can sting more than once. But the real root of the difference is that we simply don’t understand what makes wasps so important.
First, wasps provide a free pest-control service, without the ecological damage done by chemicals. Their prey include some of the most ruinous of all insects, such as the fall army worm, which causes $13bn in crop yield losses globally each year. A recent study showed that wasp predation on this species significantly reduces damage to maize plants.
A single wasp colony in your garden, meanwhile, can remove up to half a kilogram of insect prey per season—equivalent to around a quarter of a million aphids. That’s good news for those growing tomatoes and the like, and doesn’t have to come at the cost of biodiversity: because wasps prey on the most abundant species, they shouldn’t cause local extinction of any particular species.
Last but not least, just like bees, wasps pollinate: almost 1,000 plant species benefit from opportunistic visits from adult wasps, who are vegetarian and need to satisfy their hunger with sugar—again just like bees. Some orchids rely entirely on wasps for pollination, and lure in males by mimicking the back end of a female wasp.
No one enjoys having a wasp humming around their ear, but it is high time to draw the sting from our wasp-fearing culture. Wake up to how valuable they are as members of our natural world, think twice before calling pest control, and tell the wasp-phobes to buzz off.
