Wasps. Yellow jackets. Jaspers. Picnic-marauders. Meat-bees. Whatever you want to call them – September is the month where their world collapses and they intrude upon ours. This is when they fling themselves into our wine glasses and eagerly zigzag at picnics toward the ice-cream glazed lips of our offspring; when they dart into our hair and armpits or delight themselves in our breakfast condiments and newly opened soda cans. Despite all this, I urge you to be their friends.



This endorsement does not come easy to me. Eight years ago I found myself screaming, alone and naked, in a woodland. I had inadvertently, accidentally, naively urinated on a wasps’ nest and the wasps were giving me a damn good telling off about it. I had torn my clothes off. I had to. So intense was their rage, they were stinging and biting the fabric. I had to shake them off every single item of clothing I had. There were thousands of them. Passing hikers came gingerly over, attracted by my screams and eager to help me. I had to shout back “I’m OK!” to encourage them to back away from seeing my nakedness. I wasn’t ok though. I really wasn’t. For starters, there were wasp stings all over my genitals. Honestly, all over them. Though my testicles looked satisfyingly large I was in a great deal of pain. I was for days.

You might expect me to hate wasps after this experience in the woods but, against all the odds, I find that I am becoming their staunchest defender.



Here are some home-truths about wasps. Wasps did not evolve in the last 40 years since we invented popsicles and Diet Coke. They have been here for millions of years eating invertebrates, mainly caterpillars, aphids and other things gardeners hate. They are predators, on the whole. Many of them really like to eat spiders too (which means that you are a massive hypocrite if you moan about both spiders and wasps - this is like moaning about high taxes and the lack of good libraries). Many species of wasp also pollinate flowers, but when do ever hear about that? Bees are furry and disappearing from the wild and people hate the thought of this. But no one cares about wasps – even though they helped shape modern civilization (it was through wasps and their nests that humankind eventually invented paper, apparently). So there.

You see, wasps are victims. At this time of year they appear everywhere because, suddenly, they are at their peak. In summer, worker wasps need sugar to power the insatiable appetites of the young larvae in the nest. These larvae are future young queens. When they are gone, along with their queen, the nest will fall apart and the workers will be left to die. These workers helped their mother and they helped their sisters to breed, and this is the fate with which they are repaid: death. They are victims of evolution. Each year in the northern hemisphere billions of workers die this way during the late summer months. But almost each and every single worker will try to hang on. They move from place to place drunk and desperate for anything of sustenance: a spilled glass of orange juice, an empty candy wrapper in a landfill, a rotten plum stuck in the grooves of your grandfather’s wellingtons. They try to live. But they won’t.

The saddest thing about wasps is that, as individual species, they probably no longer live up to their true potential. Sure, there are good and bad years for wasps still, but in the good old days our great grandparents, in their youth, they probably enjoyed wasp years of almost Biblical proportions. Back then, they spent each day of August and September gleefully picking them out of their hair and teeth and unshaven armpit hair. (Well, not really, but you get the idea). Alas, no more: there is some evidence (at least in Britain) that peak wasp years aren’t like they used to be thanks, in part, to our increasing dependence on pesticides. There are fewer invertebrates out there for them to eat.



Now, where once I would reach for my flip-flop and kill the damn things, or remember angrily my swollen genitalia that time in the woods, I find myself considering leaving out that unwashed jam jar just a tiny bit longer. A little scrap here and there for them. A morsel I can spare. Perhaps they deserve a chance to enjoy the fruits of our harvest sometimes? Hell, without them out there pollinating the flowers and predating the pests there might not be a bloody harvest at all.

