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When most people think of wasps, they visualize annoying insects that can leave you with painful stings.
You may be surprised to learn that wasps are remarkable pollinators in late summer and early autumn.
There are actually four different kinds of wasp: paper wasps, yellow jackets, hornets and solitary wasps.
Most likely the wasps you tried to escape from at your picnic on the weekend spent their whole summer collecting caterpillars from your veggie garden.
It turns out wasps are not pests but pest controllers. Without wasps, we would need to use way more pesticides to get rid of hungry caterpillars devouring our veggies.
Female wasps are the workhorses of the wasp colony. During the summer, female wasps have one major job along with many others. The females’ job is to feed their baby larvae siblings, who number in the thousands and have not yet pupated.
So the female wasps go in search of protein in the form of caterpillars and flies. She feeds the chewed-up caterpillars to the larvae and, in return, they secrete a carbohydrate-rich sugary solution — a food source for the females.
To make sure the food she collects is only for the sibling larvae, certain female wasps have been known to stuff a male wasp inside a nest cell to keep them from consuming the food brought back for the larvae.
The colony may grow up to around 10,000 larvae and after two weeks the larvae will change into adult wasps.
You may wonder about the difference between males and females. While the female is crazy busy gathering food for the tens of thousands of larvae, the male has one job and that is to fertilize the queen so she can keep producing female workers to keep the nest humming.
In the males’ defence, when needed they will help protect the nest when the female is busy foraging for food for the larvae.
At the end of the summer, when all the siblings have turned into adult wasps, the female worker wasps are no longer getting a sugary drink. So now they actively start to look elsewhere for a source of food. They will look for something sweet at every opportunity, such as overflowing garbage cans and your sweet drinks at a barbecue.
It turns out they also search out sweet nectar from flowers.
Lucky for us, since many our pollinators are declining at an alarming rate, wasps pollinate flowers as effectively as some bees.
Knowing that, I now have a new found respect and great appreciation for wasps.
I will no longer reach for a fly swatter when wasps fly around me when enjoying a drink of pineapple juice on my patio. I will stay calm, take a deep breath and walk away.
As well, in early summer when I see wasps swarming around my veggies, I will now wish for them to stay as long as possible and gather as many caterpillars as possible.
If you want to keep wasps away from your patio, apparently they hate a citrus smell, so cut up oranges and lemons. Citronella oil will help deter them.
Gwen Petreman
Barrie
