Wasps hooked on sugar are about to start making themselves a nuisance at your barbeques, picnics and garden parties.
In late summer every year, people all across the UK notice these yellow and black little critters as they suddenly start showing a great interest in your desserts, fizzy drinks and, worst of all, your prosecco. There are suggestions that this years wasp season could be bigger due to warm conditions earlier in the year.
Before we go any further is should be said that, far from being little baddies, wasps are really vital parts of the ecosystem which play a vital role both as pollinators and as predators for other pests. However this can feel like small comfort if you end up being on the wrong end of one of their stingers.
When do wasps start getting more aggressive and interested in humans?
Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioural ecology at UCL explained that throughout much of the summer wasps aren't really that fussed on humans or our sugary snacks because they are more focussed on protein. Writing in the Conversation she said: "Despite appearances, wasps only tend to upset your outdoor life at the end of the summer. There is, in fact, plenty of wasp action throughout the summer, but you are not interesting enough for them to bother with at that time. It is very likely that the wasp you swatted at your BBQ last weekend has spent the summer removing caterpillars from your vegetable patch, or aphids from your tomatoes.
"To that hard-working mid-summer wasp, your prosecco luncheons and BBQ beers were a bore, because what she was after was protein. She is a hunter, a worker. In mid-summer, her purpose is to provide her baby siblings with protein. She is a sterile cog in a big superorganismal machine, driven by evolution to pass on her genes by raising siblings. Usually, the protein she hunts is other insects (garden caterpillars or flies). She brings prey to the colony where there are thousands of baby siblings to feed.
"She might chew the prey up a little (and perhaps ingest some too) before feeding it directly to a larva, but the bulk of the protein goes to the babies. In return for her hard work, the larva will give her a carbohydrate-rich sugary secretion. This is thought to be the main mode of nutrition for adult worker wasps. Each colony will produce several thousand worker wasps and they are kept very busy for much of the summer feeding these brood; with the drive of a drug addict, they are hooked on the sugary secretions from the lips of their baby siblings."
However, as the larva becomes wasps themselves the amount of sugar on offer goes down, this leaves these sugar addicted wasps in need of their fix from somewhere else.
"Now they look for sugar away from the colony, often at your picnics" explained Professor Sumner. "In the absence of those easy sugary feasts, they visit flowers: pollinating, just like bees. In fact, wasps can be as effective at pollination as some bees. In evolutionary terms, your picnic is a relatively novel distraction."
Will there be more wasps that usual this year?
In spring, when wasps are building their nests whether that be in trees or your attic (some actually build underground) they can be effected by extreme weather like heavy rain. However because there have been extended periods of dry weather some experts have suggested that this could lead to a larger wasp population this year.
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