{"id":15892,"date":"2023-08-03T16:03:19","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T16:03:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/?p=15892"},"modified":"2025-01-10T15:55:47","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T15:55:47","slug":"in-celebration-of-wasps-yes-seriously","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.naturepl.com\/blog\/2023\/08\/03\/in-celebration-of-wasps-yes-seriously\/","title":{"rendered":"In celebration of wasps. Yes, seriously."},"content":{"rendered":"\"Portrait<\/a>\n

WASP. A word that strikes fear into the heart of many a summer picnic. These widely scorned insects, mostly viewed with annoyance and fear, simply can’t get enough of our lunches. They loiter around bins and jam jars, with a threatening drone. Sometimes they land on us. Sometimes they sting. So unloved are they, that we tend to describe people with selfish, malicious or bad-tempered dispositions as “waspish.” Some detractors might go so far as to ask the question: what use is a wasp, anyway?<\/h3>\n

Well, you might be surprised. Consider for a moment that your knowledge of wasps might not stretch any further than the common wasp Vespula vulgaris<\/em>. Or, if you live in the USA, one of several species of yellowjackets. These social wasps live in colonies that contain thousands of workers, each tending to the queen’s offspring. The workers hunt insects to feed to the wasp brood, and in return, the tiny grubs reward the workers by secreting a sugary substance. However, at the end of the summer, when the queen dies and all the larvae have pupated into adult wasps, the workers have to look elsewhere for their sugar fix. And that leads them straight to your picnic table.<\/p>\n

But these species are just a miniscule fraction of an enormously diverse array of wasps that includes over 100,000 known species. Yes, some of them deal out stings, but 70,000 of them don’t. In fact, not only are the majority of wasps harmless to humans, science has shown that we actually depend on them. Wasps are valuable to ecosystems, to our economy, even to human health. Their venom and saliva have antibiotic properties, and there is promising evidence that the venom of some wasp species could even be used to fight cancer.<\/p>\n