Getting on with the neighbours

An unauthorised development has taken place a few doors down from my house. A community of sisters has moved in and established a home, without as much as a by- your-leave. All day long the ladies go about their business, coming to and fro, bothering nobody and having no rowdy parties at night.But the neighbours are not amused. They fear that the members of the community will turn savage and carry out unprovoked attacks upon their persons as the summer advances. Meanwhile any half-scientific observation at all will demonstrate that these new residents in fact spend all their time ridding my neighbours' gardens of such pests as greenflies, whiteflies and blackflies without even charging for the service. So why such xenophobia?

Well, to be frank, it is because the new arrivals are a community of wasps. They have built a most beautiful nest in the outside reveal of my neighbour's sitting room window, which now daren't be opened lest the wasps come in and sting the lawful inhabitants. But there is in fact nothing to fear from wasps at this time of year!

Wasps are carnivores. They spend their days at this time gathering up small pest insects, chewing them in their strong mandibles and bringing them back to their elaborate paper nest to feed their larvae which are growing in cells inside the nest. The adults – who are all female – like sweet things, and this hunger for sugar is satisfied by licking up the sweet exudates that comes from the larvae they are feeding. So they have no interest in annoying us as we sit on our patios drinking sugary drinks and eating slices of cake.

So is the fear of wasps then totally unfounded? What is all this about the sting of a dying wasp? Are politicians hijacking the behaviour of wildlife to make a political point? Like everything else, there is a grain of truth to all this. As long as the wasps are feeding young and licking off the sweet exudate in return, they have no interest outside the home. But like many a human counterpart, when the Mammy dies, the home is never the same and discipline falls apart. In the world of wasps the queen dies of old age and exhaustion by the end of August. The last lot of eggs she has laid have a life span of about six weeks. When they leave the larval stage as adults in September they discover two vital facts of life. First, that they are the last generation from that nest and so have no younger sisters to feed. And secondly, that there is no supply of sugary exudates at home in the nest for them to dine on. So they must scour the wide world as best they can for supplies of sugar to tide them over their lifetime in September and early October.

They invade our world seeking sugar and we don't like it. Never mind that we smell like nectar-bearing flowers with our shampooed hair, our fabric-conditioned clothes and our oxters reeking of deodorant. Any wasp that dares to fly in our vicinity is ruthlessly swatted with a newspaper or worse. And we have the nerve to complain of the sting of the dying wasp when it is us that has lured them to us with false promises of sweet food and then attacked first.
So my neighbouring colony of wasps has to face all this – although it is not the focused ladies feeding young who will cause any aggro. It will be their much younger sisters several generations from now.