Wasps - Friend or Foe?
Summer is coming and we know what that means - wasps! The yellow jackets that find their way into our lemonade, peanut butter and jelly sandwich and sometimes our mouths! The paper wasps that make their nests above our doorway, inspiring nightmares about the nest falling into our hair. Basically, a heck of alot of fear.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Wasps have good traits too. They eat many of the pests that decimate our gardens.
Unlike butterflies and bees, there is no nationwide effort to chart wasp numbers; they are very much neglected in the public eye. There are more than 100,000 species of described wasps, and scientists estimate five to 10 times this number are yet to be discovered.
Benefits of Wasps
Without wasps, the world could be overrun with spiders and insects. Each summer, social wasps in the UK capture an estimated 14 million kilogrammes of insect prey, such as caterpillars and greenfly. The majority of wasps are parasitoids, which have young that eat insects or spiders alive. Adult wasps don’t eat the prey they kill - they feed it to their young, known as larvae. This means that when you see these in your garden, you don’t have to use much pesticide.
As specialist predators, solitary wasps have great potential as biocontrol agents. Surprisingly, only four species of solitary wasps are commercially available for biological control (the most well-known is the Emerald jewel wasp, Ampulex compressa, which is famous for zombiefying cockroaches).
Some plants are completely reliant on wasps for pollination; at least 164 plant species across six families. Most of these are orchids which have evolved to mimic female wasp pheromones – some even look like the back end of a female wasp. Males of the Scoliidae and Thynnidae are duped into copulating with a sexy-looking orchid, during which pollen is attached to him and transferred to another flower as he flits from one sexy deceptor to the next.
Eat them! Wasp larvae have an exceptional dry protein mass (46%-81%) and provide around 70% of our required amino acids, with a low-fat content. The Japanese are especially appreciative of wasp larvae or pupae. With a market price of US$100/kg, demand is so great that sellers have to supplement their supplies with wasp nest imports from abroad.
Even the nests of wasps hold medicinal potential, with antibiotic properties effective against Streptococcus mutans (a bacterium associated with dental decay), Actinomyces and Lactobacillus found in the combs of social wasps like Polistes. The solitary mud-dauber wasps (such as Sceliphron) incorporate essential minerals into their clay nests, making them rich sources of magnesium, calcium, iron and zinc – pregnant women and children in parts of rural Africa feast on these “insect earths”.
Protecting Ourselves From Wasp Stings
I’ve often been eye to eye with a wasp as it makes a new nest or as I have a stare down about who is getting that last bite of salmon. They will even move their head back and forth as you do, making the stare down even more intense. Now I often take a small piece of food and set it aside to distract the wasps while i eat.
Fortunately, most wasps do not sting, and the large majority of those that do are solitary wasps that only hunt specific types of prey. The yellowjackets and hornets that do sting humans represent only about 70 species globally.
Social wasps are the ones we are most likely to come into contact with, particularly when they are older and seeking sugar – hence the jam sandwich attraction; they make nests and are separated into workers and queens, much like bees. Then there are solitary wasps that are laser-focused on their specific prey, anything from honeybees to spiders.
Instead of eating insects and spiders, adult wasps - both social and solitary - only feed on sugars. In the wild, sugars come from flower nectar and honeydew produced by aphids. There is also a lot of sugar at pubs and picnics. Adult wasps don’t live very long, so they don’t really need protein. They’ve just got to load up on carbs.
What to Do if You Get Stung?
Short answer is run! Unlike honeybees, wasps don’t lose out by stinging us. Honeybees sacrifice their lives as their stings have a set of tiny barbs that hook into the skin. And wasps are stinging to defend their nest, so the farther you get from the nest, the better.
Common wasp sting symptoms include pain in the sting area, swelling and redness that extends out of the sting site, itching, heat at the site of sting, and potentially hives if your body has a reaction to the sting.
First, wash the affected area with warm soap and water. Cleaning the site can remove any bacteria or venom the wasp might have carried. This will also help wash out some of the venom left behind by the wasp.
Wrap a thin cloth around an ice or cold pack. Apply this pack to the sting site for 30 to 60 minutes, in intervals of 10 minutes on and off. This will help reduce the swelling and pain of the wasp sting.
To reduce the swelling, take an anti-inflammatory medicine like ibuprofen. This will help lessen pain from the wasp sting and also reduce swelling at the sting site.
