We wouldn’t have Shakespeare or the Bible without our friends the wasps!

NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

THE young woman in the café was very careful to remove the wasp. She put a glass over the insect and slid a piece of card under before ejecting the flying nuisance through the door.

The wasp had been bothering customers who responded with flapping arms and panic as they protected their lunch. The wasp returned a few minutes later.

The threat from being stung by a wasp is at its most pronounced in August. This is when the normal social structure of the wasp colony is breaking down.

Here the annual cycle changes from raising worker wasps to raising fertile queens who start a new colony the following spring and the workers are no longer needed.

The worker wasps are disorientated and go searching for sugary foods and conflict with humankind occurs.

I have a hard sell here writing in praise of an unwelcome late summer visitor to picnics.

However, the wasp has many admirable qualities such as loyalty to group, industry and the willingness to sacrifice itself to the greater good. Its industriousness should be recognised

The wasp is the gardener’s friend and is a top predator in the garden. Their favourite prey is aphids, those rose-killers and tormentors of every gardener’s favourite plants. Without the wasp, gardeners would have to be reliant on more pesticides.

The industry of the wasp exceeds that of the bee in its endeavours to build a nest. It is formed of a papery substance produced by the insect chewing wood fibre into a pulp and spreading it out in a thin layer.

There are few examples of insect architecture that excel the nest of the wasp.

The first few cells are extended horizontally being always covered in, then another layer is formed below in the same manner and so on until a structure is assembled – a busy colony of active workers, developing larvae or hatching eggs.

The whole structure is waterproofed by the pulpy preparation that is mixed with a secretion produced by the insect.

A narrow opening provides the entrance and the exit for the wasp.

We also owe the wasp a great deal in that it helped to bring into existence a product that greatly assisted in the development of human progress.

I should explain. Millennia ago a Chinese functionary at the imperial court around the time of the birth of Christ was marvelling at the way in which wasps created their nests. He subsequently came up with the idea of paper.

Paper then spread slowly into the Islamic world and eventually into Europe.

With paper, ideas and belief structures could be more easily transmitted. So we owe the Bible, Shakespeare the works of Isaac Newton – not forgetting Marvel comics – to our yellow and black striped friends