Lydia Wong was 22 years old and about to start graduate studies focused on wild bees when, while working with her brother on their sister’s farm outside Belleville, Ont., she inadvertently disturbed a wasp’s nest hidden in a bale of hay.
“The moment we touched it, a huge swarm of yellowjackets came flying at us, and they all flew up my shirt, into my sleeves, and were just stinging me in the arms,” she says.
How many stings was it? “I think I counted at least a dozen,” she says, unfazed by the encounter. The fact is that Wong is an avowed wasp enthusiast. “I still love them,” she says.
Now a doctoral student at the University of Ottawa who studies cavity-nesting bees, especially in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wong still can’t quit her wasp fascination.
“I think part of my love for them is feeling like they get the brunt of society’s disdain,” she says. “If you Google ‘cartoon bee’ and then ‘cartoon wasp,’ the cartoon wasps are the demonic versions of bees — they all have swords and devil eyes.
”That’s not who wasps are in my opinion.”
What are they? Important pollinators? The pest controllers of the insect world? Non-stingers, mostly? All true, but Wong is interested in something altogether different:
“I think they’re great moms,” she says.
That take — and more on the maternal prowess of wasps later — will come as a surprise for those of us whose encounters with these winged creatures are limited to picnics and patios. At no point in any given year is human disdain for the wasp more complete than now, in the months of August and September, when the yellowjackets crawl out of the woodwork en masse. They want in on our soft drinks, to canoodle with our hotdogs, to buzz our Beaver Tails. This year in particular, especially the past month, has just felt more waspy. At one Elgin Street pub a few days ago, the wasps flew crookedly over the heads of the beery patrons, so thick in the air that ignoring them became a collective form of madness.
Why have things been so bad? It could be the dry weather.
“We had a weird year with some cool, wet weather early on, then it got hot and dry,” says Rob Longair, a research associate at the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes in Ottawa. “It’s quite possible that that gave them the opportunity to increase the size of the colonies more than they might have in a year it was cooler overall.”
And was this year markedly worse than last? Longair can’t say — no one can. “There’s no good monitoring or measuring system for that.”
While it’s hard to know what effect climate change is having on wasp populations, what is certain is that species such as the European hornet are increasingly being seen creeping north to the Ottawa Valley from the United States with the increasing temperatures, Longair says.
Like Wong, he likes to counter any hint of anti-wasp sentiment.
“These things are killing hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of the insects out there we don’t like,” Longair says, referring to things like caterpillars that eat forests and aphids that consume crops. “Certain types do that in addition to those that come to your picnic and cut off a piece of barbecue — which they think is a dead animal and they’re just taking it back.”
Such late summer interactions have everything to do with the lifecycle of certain wasp species — the so-called social wasps associated in this part of Canada most often with yellowjackets (which is just one species of wasp found in this country).
Here the narrative begins to sound much like some medieval plot: Each year in this part of the world, soon after September’s peak-wasp numbers, the approach of winter kills every yellowjacket in each colony except the new queens, which burrow into the earth for long hibernation.
Next, in the spring, these queens dig themselves out and begin the new year by scraping together enough wood to chew into a pulp. The initial stages of these paper nests, whether built in trees, in the eaves of your home, or under ground, are often no bigger than just a few chambers, or cells, into which the queen lays its first eggs. Now the queen embarks on a food-hunting campaign to feed its larvae, which in time pupate into workers. These workers in turn take up the hunt, while the queen stays at home and escalates its egg-laying, obligating the workers to forage more and more to feed the growing colony.
Over the first half of each summer, humans see little evidence of this story that’s playing out, but by August the queen has begun to slow down, the yellowjacket population reaches its zenith and the labour required to maintain the colony begins to diminish. The result is a bumper crop of bored, perhaps hungry yellowjacket workers gathering at Ottawa watering holes and patios.
“They are still coming to me when I have my lunch,” says Sarah Coulber, gardening for wildlife specialist with the Canadian Wildlife Federation. “But I find, if I’m calm and I’m peaceful and I’m not swatting them, they come, they check it out, they check me out, then they go.
“Stinging wasps are usually the social wasps because they’ve got something to protect,” she says.
“They’re wired to protect the hive, the community.”
Perhaps as a subtle nod to the public consensus about wasps, wasp enthusiasts tend to gravitate to the solitary varieties of the insects, which carry names as evocative and mysterious as rare birds: potter or mason wasps, for example, which often fashion tiny jars in which to store the prey used to feed their young, or mud daubers, which construct tubes to keep their delicacies.
“They’re such cool insects,” says Wong, the University of Ottawa doctoral student. “I just saw one wasp the other day that’s very common in urban areas and I’ve seen in Ottawa lots. They’ll catch baby crickets, sting them and paralyze them, bring them to their nest — the cricket is still alive and not able to move to make it easier to transport fresh — and then the wasp lays a baby wasp on it and the baby wasp grows up and eats up the fresh cricket.”
Just as a mother should.
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