Wasps such as yellow-jackets and hornets live together in a nest with an egg-laying queen. While the majority of species are solitary, with each adult female living and breeding independently.
Love them or hate then, wasps like all earth's little helpers play an important ecological role in the environment.
As well as being voracious and ecologically important predators, controlling the numbers of potential pests like greenfly and many caterpillars. Wasps are increasingly recognized as valuable pollinators, transferring pollen as they visit flowers to drink nectar.
When nests have larvae, the workers must collect protein, which accounts for all those invertebrates they hunt in our gardens. The larvae are able to convert their protein-rich diet into carbohydrates that they secrete as a sugary droplet to feed the adults.
It is their thirst for sweet liquids that helps to explain why they become so bothersome at this time of year. Wasp nests have very large numbers of workers but they have stopped raising any larvae.
Solitary wasps hunt almost every pest insect, making wasps valuable in horticulture for biological pest control of species such as white-fly in tomatoes and other crops.
It has been estimated that the wasp might account for 14 million kilograms of insect prey across the summer months, just in the U.K. alone.
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