
Wasps: If you can't love them, at least admire them - sohkamyung
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-49692974
======
elboru
As a kid I once experienced something worth of an Animal Planet show. I was a
typical city boy, but I had family in the country side, I would spend some
weeks down there on summers. For me that was extremely boring since I didn’t
have other kids to play with, I didn’t have my Nintendo nor even a TV near. So
one of those days my boredom drove me outside, a blue wasp caught my
attention, it was beautiful and it was doing something peculiar, it was using
its antennas to sense something in the ground, after a while it would start
digging small holes with its arms, then it would stop and try sensing again,
that happened a couple of times, the holes it made where almost perfect
circles, after some minutes it went inside one of those holes and then it took
out a really big larva, the larva was clearly some magnitudes bigger than the
wasp, but it didn’t matter, the wasp took it outside and it flew away with it.
That was a surreal experience for me as a kid it opened my eyes, it showed me
a lot of amazing things happen every day, and we don’t even realize it.

~~~
avip
Chrysididae. Diverse family of beautiful, solitary parasite wasps.

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paulannesley
> He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral
> birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the
> unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp,
> wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place,
> revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous
> in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the
> ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.

… I think William Gibson did not instil a love of wasps in me.

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danans
> So what does he say when people tell him they hate wasps. "I just cry." He
> laughs. "Why don't people already love wasps? They're the lions of the
> insect world."

Yes, but freak zoo escapes aside, I can mostly avoid lions by staying out of
the Serengeti.

Jerkish wasps are always trying to get into my beer, especially in the UK -
they are really aggressive there.

~~~
masklinn
> Jerkish wasps are always trying to get into my beer, especially in the UK -
> they are really aggressive there.

Inquisitive is probably a better qualifier than aggressive. In my experience
european wasps have low aggression: they're not going to sting you out of
nowhere, but they tend to buzz and stay around and investigate pretty much
anything that looks edible (foods, drinks, people, …), leading to people
trying to swat them, and that's when things get iffier.

Even european hornets are not really aggressive, but they're big enough to
trigger a more primal terror even in people who are generally fine with
insects.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
People who get stung out of nowhere have been swatting the wasp away, or are
leaping around trying to avoid them. It's no wonder really. Mind you, most
people give the same reaction to bees which are positively docile. People
generally seem to find you insane if you don't participate in this swatting
and running away business. :)

Now if you were drinking your beer right by where a wasp nest happened to be,
yeah then there'd be aggression.

~~~
kaoD
> Now if you were drinking your beer right by where a wasp nest happened to
> be, yeah then there'd be aggression.

That reminded me of my last camping trip this summer. Right as we set up near
a fountain and started eating, wasps started to gather around our food
(apparently they love blue cheese scent) to the point we had to relocate to be
able to eat (they were pretty insistent).

We ended up relocating with the sun falling so we missed a wasp nest in a rock
about 3 metres away from our tent!

We noticed it a couple days later since we stopped caring after not being
disturbed by any more wasps.

They got out of their nest at high vertical velocity, and it faced away from
our tent, so we just weren't in their flight path. A few came to visit, but
they stopped gathering around our blue cheese and mostly went hunting near
tree roots.

------
dizzyfingers
I am fascinated by tarantula hawks, the first time I saw one flying I thought
it was a black humming bird! I’ve watched one hunt a tarantula and drag it 25
yards across a yard to it’s layer. The deep blue black and contrasting copper
wings are visually stunning. Oh yeah and the second most painful sting right
behind the bullet ant, right in my own middle American suburban back yard!

~~~
uwuhn
Tarantula hawks are my favorite insect.

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peterwwillis
I was very glad to have some wasps help me with my gardening this year!

Earlier this summer, I was pruning my tomato plants, when I came across a
giant green tomato hornworm attached under a leafy stem. I looked up and
noticed an entire stem's leaves had already been decimated by it! But lucky
for me, I had a bunch of flowering plants right beside the tomatoes, and some
miniature wasps had been frequenting them. They'd found the hornworm before me
and laid a couple hundred egg sacs on its back, incapacitating it. Later on
the larvae hatched and devoured the hornworm. Weeks later I found another
similar hornworm, half-way devoured. In both cases, wasps saved my tomatoes
from potential disaster.

~~~
pjmlp
I have a similar symbiotic relationship with spiders.

They are allowed to freely roam around, as long as they take of all the summer
bugs that happen to fly in during Summer time.

Ah and don't get too crazy with their webs.

------
jmspring
After getting stung 5+ times yesterday, not a fan of them. Apparently, they
leave a scent encouraging further attacks. We just happened to be doing clean
up near an undergrown hive.

~~~
wavefunction
I have a fair amount of wasps in my vicinity: mud daubers and paper wasps
mostly it seems. They're very inquisitive and curious but not necessarily
belligerent. I've never had any problems with them so I generally leave them
alone, though I do clean their nests off my house and shed.

*One of the coolest experiences of my life spent outside was watching a tarantula hawk and tarantula engage in mortal combat right in front of my friend and I as we were sitting and relaxing in a park.

~~~
wahern
Where I grew up as a kid you were always warned about yellowjackets, not wasps
generally. Not knowing how to discern a yellowjacket I guess I was generally
wary of wasps, particularly any wasp that was yellowish, but never had the
mindset that all wasps were aggressive. A wasp-shaped thing that was black
wouldn't have been something I'd think twice about.

What sucks about yellowjackets is that they're easy to dismiss as bees. You
can ignore bees; indeed, you _should_ ignore them. Not ignoring bees is how
you get stung. Yellowjackets have a reputation for being capricious. Ignoring
a yellowjacket is how you get stung, not how you avoid getting stung. At
least, that seemed to be the wisdom.

~~~
hvidgaard
I really don't understand how to mistake a bee for a yellowjacket - they look
very different, and about the only thing they have in common are that they fly
and some bees have a yellowish color that does not look like the bright
yellow.

They sound different, they are build quite different, and they fly
differently. Just observing bees on flowers for a few minutes every day in the
summer and it's obvious, at least it is to me.

------
barking
Man walks into a shop and says "Three wasps please". Shopkeeper replies "We
don't sell wasps". Man says "That's odd because you have a load of them in
your front window". \--joke I heard the footballer Paul Gascoigne tell many
years ago.

~~~
mongol
Not sure I get it..?

~~~
barking
In old fashioned small shops it was common to have a display of your
merchandise in the front window. This would tend attract/trap wasps in
summertime especially if it was a cakeshop or similar. I probably should have
said cakeshop! You know you've failed when you need to explain a joke. :)

------
NohatCoder
I once saw a wasp drink an entire drop of white wine, then it ran around on a
napkin briefly stopping once in a while, leaving a little wet spot behind. So
relatable.

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cm2012
To me, wasps are strong evidence that if there is a creator God he is
indifferent to cruelty. Almost all wasp species, to survive, implant their
young in hosts. When the young are born they eat the host alive from the
inside out. This is the natural order and the order is fucked.

~~~
mhh__
"Well, it's funny that the people, when they say that this is evidence of the
Almighty, always quote beautiful things. They always quote orchids and
hummingbirds and butterflies and roses." But I always have to think too of a
little boy sitting on the banks of a river in west Africa who has a worm
boring through his eyeball, turning him blind before he's five years old. And
I reply and say, "Well, presumably the God you speak about created the worm as
well," and now, I find that baffling to credit a merciful God with that
action.

\- David Attenborough

~~~
clay_the_ripper
I see this argument a lot for the non-existence of a higher power, god
whatever. But it’s based on the (I think false) presumption that in order for
a higher power to exist, that power must necessarily intend for humans on an
individual basis have nothing bad happen to them. This is clearly false since
the world is full of suffering, pain, genocide, murder and the like.
Obviously, the point of life is not for all us to get along and be happy
because nothing bad happens, it’s to try to overcome the horror and live in
the appreciation of every moment that we are alive, no matter the pain or
suffering. Living in enteral peace is easy when nothing bad happens, it’s when
the shit hits the fan that the real work begins.

In my humble view, each of us has a part to play in the greater order of the
universe. Sometimes that part is to be rich and comfortable. Other times it’s
to be a starving child. If you believe in re-incarnation, all of us are the
starving child AND the billionaire.

~~~
mhh__
> must necessarily intend for humans on an individual basis have nothing bad
> happen to them

This is at very least at odds with Christian teaching e.g. the personal god is
one believed in by many.

This regardless of the lack of scientific evidence for the existence of God.

~~~
kaoD
I don't know which specific Christian sect you're referring to but in
Catholicism God isn't seen as merciful on Earth. Penance and repentance (due
to our sins, including the Original Sin) are core parts of their belief.

Old testament's God is a jerk. Only on afterlife will you be absolved of your
sins (or sent to hell I guess).

~~~
cygx
But note that before the Fall, things were supposedly perfect, and some
theologians place emphasis on the fact that sin and death entered the world
through the actions of one man (Adam), and so did redemption and eternal life
through Jesus, another human (fully so, despite having no mortal father and
being fully God at the same time - Christianity is weird...)

It's a bit of a struggle to harmonize this with evolution, but Catholics are
free to believe in it as long as they also affirm the existence of a
historical Adam and Eve that did _something_ to cause the Fall...

~~~
rmilejczz
It was actually Eve, not Adam, who partakes of the fruit, though most
theologians would blame Lucifer, and some may even say God intended for all of
that to happen anyway

~~~
cygx
That 'through one man thing' comes from Paul (Romans 5:12, if you want to get
specific).

Historically, not all theologians were big on female agency (there's even a
theory that a woman only fully takes part in the imago dei when united with
man through marriage, whereas a man has it on his own; can't quite remember if
that was a Jewish of Christian thing, though...)

------
yesenadam
Short (9min) Cronenberg film _The Nest_ about..a wasp infestation. I liked it.
Very Cronenbergy.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFh5LbTPI4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odFh5LbTPI4)

------
buyingarmor
Wasp is the most hated animal in the world probably

There is also a group in Reddit only about people who hate Wasps

[https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckwasps](https://old.reddit.com/r/fuckwasps)

~~~
gnrlst
Second only to mosquitos. They should be obliterated from the world. In the
western world they are annoying, in other parts of the world they are the
deadliest animal/insect.

------
yardshop
Last summer I had a big white faced hornet nest next to my front door.
Unfortunately I had to spray it with poison.

This year there was a big active yellow jacket nest in one of my sheds. The
day I put out some non-poison traps, I noticed there were very few bugs flying
around. A couple days later there were none. Something got to them already. I
don't know what would kill a whole nest like that unless they got into poison
from one of my neighbors.

I think they're actually beautiful animals and I don't want to kill them, but
I can't have them right near the house.

~~~
Schweigi
You should have kept the hornets nest to keep away wasps. Its pretty
impressive to watch a hornet snap a wasp in half mid-flight. At least were i
grew up hornets do not care a lot about coming to grab food when eating
lunch/dinner outside and usually stay away from humans.

~~~
yardshop
If it was actually hornets and not two feet from my front door, maybe!

White faced hornets, also called bald faced hornets, are relatives of yellow
jackets and technically wasps. They are misnamed hornets because of their
size. They are even more aggressive than yellow jackets and one bug can sting
you several times in a few seconds.

------
Sol-
Very interesting. I always disliked that internet meme that Wasps are useless
and made to annoy humans, as if anything that doesn't look pleasing to us or
is a bit dangerous has no place in nature. It should be obvious that Wasps
have a purpose in our ecosystems, as do most things, of course.

------
ed_blackburn
All these popular culture references to wasps. And yet no mention of The Wasp
Fsctory?

~~~
kwhitefoot
Seriously disturbing book. Read it many, many years ago, couldn't put it down.
It's still on my shelf but I'm not sure I can bring myself to read it again.

------
RickJWagner
I was hoping to learn something about wasp spray.

That stuff is nothing short of amazing. If you spray some in the air (at a
flying wasp), the wasp will instantly drop dead to the ground. Not a quiver.

What on earth can make something be so instantly fatal?

------
teeray
Anecdata: we had a crazy spring in New Hampshire for the mosquito population.
It was extraordinarily uncomfortable to spend any time outside during May /
June. Over these past few weeks, their populations seem to have plummeted near
my house, making it quite enjoyable during the evenings now. The only
difference is the appearance of two enormous bald-faced hornet nests in some
nearby (but not too nearby) trees. I couldn't find any explicit mention of
mosquitoes in their diet, but they do seem to have an appetite for all kinds
of insects.

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sixothree
We work in a fairly old building and wasps sometimes find their way into our
offices. We used to freak out and get spray or something.

But we learned the easiest way to get rid of wasps is to just open a door that
leads outside. They will find it and go away.

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ChuckMcM
Okay, a .2mm wasp that flies has got to be pretty cool.

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niceworkbuddy
I can't admire them for biting me in the leg, sorry ;-)

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zabil
and orchids outwit wasps, scary.

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choeger
So we are in the middle of an insect apocalypse and we are now told to love
these killers? Ha, nice piece of propaganda! This guy probably has a wasp's
egg somewhere in his brain! Killem all, I say! /S

