People love bees. They give us healthy honey to snack on, and they work hard to pollinate the flowers. A worker bee is seen by many as one that helps keep the world moving. After all, at least 35 percent of crops of the planet’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce, of which bees are a part of.
Wasps, on the other hand, don’t get such a nice reputation.
Instead, their reputation is one about aggression and painful stings.
If the lowly bee is seen as symbolism of hard work, the wasp is seen as a mix of rage, fury, anger, and just outright hate for anything that isn’t a wasp. Meme pictures of wasps on anger steroids plague the internet, as most people believe that wasps are nothing more than pests that need to be driven out.
And now that it’s summer again, and peak activity season for wasps, the question by many annoyed citizens looking at the wasp nest on their backyard are asking is:
“Do we really need wasps?”
Some background The history of wasps can be traced as far as the Jurassic era, and are suspected to have evolved from other, smaller insects.
Yes, that basically means that wasps were already around when dinosaurs still roamed the plant.
Eventually, they started to diversify. Today, it is estimated that there are at least twenty thousand species of wasps all over the world!
An apex predator
Wasps are predators and, unlike bees, hunt live prey for a source of protein.
But the food isn’t for them. Rather, it’s for their young. Live prey is mandatory to feed their carnivorous larvae, while adults choose to feed on sugars from nectar instead.
Some such insects that are a part of its menu include: Caterpillars, Aphids, Flies, Spiders, and other small insects.
Do you notice what those insects have in common? They are all regarded as household pests.
Yes, even spiders, while usually helpful in clearing out other pests, can instead become quite the handful if their population is unregulated and they are allowed to spiral out of control. Their population usually spikes during the summer in many places.
What does this mean?
You are basically getting free pest-control services that is also environmentally friendly. That means you are less likely to need toxic pesticides when these common household pests aren’t around in the first place.
But it gets even better. Studies have shown that these pest-cleaning janitors can be used in agriculture pest control.
Caterpillars, for instance, are one of the worst enemies of farmers, as they are voracious eaters and can chew through the leaves and fruit of their crops, effectively destroying them.
When wasps were introduced to their environment, they effectively managed to keep the pest population to a minimum, thus helping reduce crop damage as a whole.
When used as an alternative to pesticides, wasps can help neutralize pests without the risk of also potentially damaging the crops from chemicals.
Every flower gets pollinated
Remember when I mentioned earlier about how adult wasps prefer to dine sugars from nectar?
Wasps are also pollinators of flowers. As it turns out, wasps are also part of the pollinators mentioned earlier that allow the crops to reproduce, and they are excellent ones at that.
Also, wasps are generalists in the sense that they are not fussy with the flowers they pollinate. Compare that to bees which are picky and are only likely to focus on one flower at a time when pollinating.
While this means that wasps are not as efficient as bees, they are more flexible in their environments. For instance, wasp pollinators will benefit urban farmers more, especially when there are no flowery areas for the bees to pollinate.
Why the hate?
Misinformation and lack of information can be pointed as the culprit here, as despite their own significance in the environment, people do not see them in the same light as they see bees.
It does not really help that studies of wasps are not as widespread as that of bees, contributing to the misinformation that wasps are pests on the same levels of mosquitoes and flies.
What about their aggressive reputation?
There is no denying that wasps also have this reputation of being an unforgiving stinging machine, willing to chase humans as far away as possible.
This is true to an extent: Wasps are much more territorial than bees and will also chase humans farther than bees do from their nests.
If you try to swat a wasp, they will emit chemicals that basically tell every able defender in the hive that you are a threat, and send them after you, stingers and all. Even worse, wasps can sting multiple times, unlike bees that can only sting once before dying.
However, while people perceive these acts of aggression as open hostility, the wasps instead see it as defending themselves and their nests. The problem is that wasps either often build their nests too close to human settlements (Therefore, humans inevitably walking nearby will be seen as a threat) or humans might attempt to swat away a curious wasp out of reflex (Which it will see as a lethal threat, thus calling its hive to assist it).
A buzzing buddy?
While probably not as approachable as bees are, wasps are far from the demonic pests most of us perceive them as.
They are actually immensely helpful for the environment in many ways, and hopefully this article could at least help you appreciate them a bit more.
Don’t worry, you can still appreciate them at least 50 feet away at all times.