There is a reasonable reason for this.
Today, at my oh-so-glamorous retail job, my colleagues were overreacting to this post's featured species. Earlier in the week, they called the exterminators in, who came and sprayed some poison and completely overlooked the fact that it is late summer in England.
Let me expand.
Towards the end of summer, the wasp queens gradually stop laying eggs. The workers, who have up to this point been using their developing siblings to convert mashed up insect remains into sweet sugary nectar, are left out of a job and out of food.
So, more than a bit peckish and possibly having mid-life crises as they realise that they have spent their entire adult life raising something which no longer needs them, they go a-wandering. And in their wanderings, they find that sweet things, previously only really encountered in flowers and at the business ends of their little brothers and sisters, are everywhere.
In retail, sweet things often go out of date, or are dropped on the floor and rendered somehow unsaleable. They are then thrown into a large bin, in a half-heartedly tied bag, and put outside.
Starving wasps smell this sweet waste from some distance and come flocking. Having temporarily eaten their fill at the waste, they explore the surrounding area, and, should they wander inside, become disoriented by artificial light-sources, and become trapped inside, where they will eventually either find their way out, or die.
Killing the wasps inside the shop, or even on the bin, or - should you locate it - at the nest will have little effect. None of these is the source of the wasps, which are now vagrants with sweet... mandibles, and indeed the only extermination that could wholly prevent their arrival is of every social wasp in the country. Even if this was viable, the reduced predation on insect larvae the following year could easily turn large swathes of the country into desert.
So - as I have now told you, and as I told my co-workers before they called for the exterminators, extermination is useless. As preventing access to the shop is also not viable (customers and staff fit through holes a little too large to exclude wasps), the only reliable way to discourage these wasps is to remove the local food source - to whit, to clean the years of sugary filth of the outside of the bins, to ensure that the bins are closed and thus not attracting wasps, and to be certain to contain and clean up any spillages.
An easier option is to simply avoid sitting on or swatting at the wasps. As they are no longer protecting nests, they tend to sting much less readily, although they can still become aggressive if directly offended - to whit, being swatted at or partially crushed.
One argument against this laissez-faire attitude is that they are annoying.
This, and note sarcasm, is absolutely a reason to take something's life.
I'll reward you for trawling through that lengthy pre-amble with a photograph. Spheksophobes should either accept that a picture is not going to sting them or skip ahead.
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| A female V. germanica eating sugar. Bosham, West Sussex, UK. |
After that picture break, here's the taxonomy:
- Eukaryota
- Animalia
- Eumetazoa
- Bilateralia
- Nephrozoa - see also Thelotornis capensis, Lygodactylus capensis, Chalcophaps indica, Sterna hirundo, Ardea goliath, Trachylepis varia and Hipposideros vittatus.
- Protostomia
- Ecdysozoa
- Arthropoda - see also Ligia oceanica, Dicranopalpus ramosus, Enoplognatha ovata and Hyllus argyrotoxus
- Hexapoda
- Insecta
- Dicondylia
- Pterygota
- Manopterygota - see also Enallagma cyathigerum and Pseudagrion hageni
- Neoptera - see also Sybilla, Stictogryllacris punctata and Cyathosternum prehensile.
- Eumetabola - see also Pephricus and Anoplocnemis curvipes
- Endopterygota - see also Hagenomyia tristis, Zebronia phenice, Laelia robusta, Anthocharis cardamines, Acada biseriata, Panorpa germanica, Megistocera filipes, Diasemopsis meigenii, Episyrphus balteatus, Helophus pendulus Demetrias atricapillus, Anthia fornasinii, Melolontha melolontha, Otiorhynchus atroapterus, Malachius bipustulatus and Senaspis haemorrhoa
- Hymenopterida
- Hymenoptera
- Apocrita
- Aculeata - see also Astata tropicalis
- Vespoidea
- Vespidae - see also Synagris proserpina
-Vespinae
Vespula germanica
(Fabricius 1793)
Otherwise known as the German wasp - rather misleadingly, as it is not confined to Germany but native to much of Europe and introduced to just about every large city within the temperate zones of the world, where - in the absence of various similar Eurasian species - it is often known simply as the yellowjacket.
For a similarly misleading regional name, see Panorpa germanica.
That's all, folks.
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