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Wasps

GNC

GNC

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I was going to add this to the Bees thread, but thought better of it. It's along similar lines, though: where are the wasps? I haven't seen any this year and we usually get quite a few, so what happened to them?

Granted, they are the scariest animal in Britain and I don't really miss them, but they must have purpose, so could their mysterious disappearance have an effect on the environment like the missing bees will?
 
There was a huuuuuge wasp in my bathroom yesterday!

I mean enormous...about 2 inches long!

I ushered it outside and it buzzed off into the Sussex skies....
 
Are you sure it wasn't a hornet? They can get pretty big.
 
They're at my house.

No kidding. A bunch of them built a nest in the air vents and now whenever I go outside I get dive-bombed :x

Now that you mention it though, apart from my houseguests I haven't seen any others in a few years. Especially the little European wasps. We used to have them all around our house when I was little. Never see them anymore.

The extinction begins :shock:
 
Wasps are major pollinators of plants, including our food plants. Without them (and bees) we would have serious food shortages so it could be time to worry. :(
 
I've also noticed the wasp shortage this year (quite a relief, what with having been stung in the neck by one the previous summer). However, I don't think there's reason to worry on the strength of one season alone; as far as I understand it's quite normal for any animal population to ebb and swell. Balance is not something stationary, but more like the swing of a pendulum.

We've had record numbers of birds in my garden this year, so I wonder whether there's a connection.
 
There's not many wasps around this year because of the cold wet spring we had. Don't worry though, they'll be back next year!

As for the bees........I fear that's something far more serious!
 
Wasps're great. I had a wasps' nest in the eaves of the house a few years ago and I wouldn't have dreamed of destroying it.

When I sat out in the sun I could often hear the wasps on the fence, scraping off tiny shards of wood to enlarge the nest with. Hardworking little dears. :)

Anyway, one stung the ex years ago. Anyone who does that is a friend of mine. :yeay:
 
A few years back, a tribe of leaf-cutting wasps made some alarming inroads into my Virginia Creeper. Catching them at it, ferrying the large portions of leaf back to their nest was quite entertaining.

I used to keep an aerosol of pyrethrin-based spray in the house. It is slow to bring down bluebottles but wasps seemed to drop directly it hit them - as I discovered to my cost when one dropped from the ceiling straight down my shirt-sleeve, delivering a fierce sting to the tenderest part of my arm as a valiant last act. Oddly, I have witnessed wasps that looked to have expired on a draining-board begin to revive after some hours.

I've seen very few in recent years and suspect it may well be a sign of ecological changes as suggested. So probably not such a good thing after all. :(
 
I find wasps very resilient, which makes their disappearance all the more strange. When I try to whack a stripey invader, usually the blow simply stuns them, but it does give me the opportunity to escort them from the premises on a newspaper.

Anyway, I heard that if you do succeed in squashing one, its, erm, goo will exude a chemical that attracts more wasps who rush to its defence. Dunno if that's true, though.
 
Ronson8 said:
Wasps are major pollinators of plants, including our food plants. Without them (and bees) we would have serious food shortages so it could be time to worry. :(
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Really??! I had no idea. I always thought bees did all the good stuff like honey and pollination, and wasps were just vicious bastards landing on your sticky bun and stinging you.

Good grief, I am woefully ignorant. But at least I have the grace to be ashamed of it. That's the last time I swat one.

I once killed a bee (yeah I know I'm a git) and it make the most godawful mournful buzz as it lay dying....
 
AnyankaJ said:
However, I don't think there's reason to worry on the strength of one season alone; as far as I understand it's quite normal for any animal population to ebb and swell. Balance is not something stationary, but more like the swing of a pendulum.
Click to expand...
Much more complicated than that, actually (says rynner, who did an OU maths course a few years ago 8) ). Rather than with the regularity of a pendulum, animal populations can vary in a chaotic manner...

(but that's perhaps too technical to discuss here).
 
I haven't noticed a shortage. A few weeks ago one stung me in bed. I wasn't very happy but the poor thing seemed almost inebriated - perhaps thrown out of the nest and drowning its sorrows on fermented fruit?

Wasps do seem to make a bee-line (wasp-line?) to sting me - has any research been done on what attracts them to certain individuals?
 
With wasps, it is likely just the lousy weather that took a toll on them. You always see more if we have dry mild autumns and winters (the buggers survive the winter and get bigger!). Bad weather at the start of this year probably affected them in the hives.

I say probably, because we can see the effect Colony Collapse Disorder is having on bees, because we keep bees. I don't know anybody keeping wasps, so it is possible that something similar is happening to them, and we just haven't seen it yet!

Wasps, as with bees, are pollinators. Their loss would have an impact, but not as great an impact as has been made out - the majority of our staple foods are wind pollinated, not insect pollinated. Fruit however will have lower yields without bees and wasps, as will flowers. And the knock on effects to anything in the food chain relying on high numbers of wasps, bees etc is worth looking into. I imagine lower yields of fruit and flowers means other pollinators will have a tougher time finding food, meaning their numbers will go down. Anything predating on them will have a tougher time, and so on up the food chain.

We live in interesting times.
 
CarlosTheDJ said:
There was a huuuuuge wasp in my bathroom yesterday!

I mean enormous...about 2 inches long!

I ushered it outside and it buzzed off into the Sussex skies....
Click to expand...

This was probally a queen wasp. You sometimes see them this time of year. They hibernate during the winter so it was probally looking for somewhere warm to bed down for the winter and wait for the spring

I agree there have been a lot fewer wasps round this year.
This is good in my opinion not because i don't like wasps but because i work in a college and one wasp in a classroom can disrupt a class for hours. Long after the actual wasp has gone.
I always put them outside as i do all insects or animals who find their way inside.
 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/humber/8213887.stm

Farmer killed in attack by wasps

A farmer has been stung to death by a swarm of wasps in East Yorkshire, his family has confirmed.

Mark Evison, 47, had been cutting grass as he cleared a ditch in Ellerker, near South Cave, on Sunday evening when he disturbed a wasps' nest.

Relatives said he had died after suffering a severe allergic reaction despite the efforts of paramedics.

Mr Evison's brother Paul, 50, said: "We were very, very close. I feel as though half of myself has died."

He described how he received a phone call from his brother at Croft Garth Farm on Sunday evening.

Unconscious

"He said 'The wasps have got me Paul', so I ran round as fast as I could and found him sat in the chair.

"He said 'I don't feel very well at all'.

"Then he went unconscious and I rang 999 straight away and they were here in less than 10 minutes.

"They did everything they could, injected him with adrenalin, but unfortunately it was fatal."

He said his brother had needed hospital treatment two years ago after suffering a reaction to a wasp sting, but he had then made a full recovery.

The coroner has been informed and an inquest will be held.

Mr Evison's funeral will be held on Tuesday at St Anne's Church in Ellerker.

East Riding of Yorkshire Council's pest control team has destroyed the wasp nest.

Latest official figures show there were four deaths in England and Wales in 2007 due to contact with hornets, wasps or bees.
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Horrible way to go. I still haven't seen any wasps this year, and after reading that I'm glad!
 
Where I walk my dogs, we have to squeeze through a gap in a fence where, I'm often told, there's a humungous wappy nest.
Everyone swears they'll never go that way again because of it. I still use the gap because I've not seen a single wasp there, though. Strange.
 
Maybe they're hearing just the buzzing...

mooks out
 
Update. Wasps and Bees are healthy and active in Nottinghamshire. They are thriving and some of the buggers are very big.
 
We have more wasps this year than we have had in recent years. (Hemel Hempstead) They seem to be smaller though, and far more persistant.

A few months ago one made a special journey up my shirt sleeve just to sting me. I am afraid i killed it whilst flailing around in pain.

Our local garden centre was selling fake wasps nests - a cloth bag about the size & colour of a real one, that you stuff with old carrier bags and hang prominently wherever you do not want wasps. The idea is that they will stay away for fear of straying on another colonies' manor.
Don't know how effective it is but they seemed to have sold loads. Might try one but £9.99 seemed a lot for what it was.
 
A local restaurant has a number of clear plastic baggies full of water (as you would use to take a pet goldfish home) hanging from the eaves over the front door and surrounding area. Each has 4 or 5 copper pennies in them. The waitress said they frighten off wasps, but darned if I can remember how they are supposed to work.
 
amarok2005 said:
A local restaurant has a number of clear plastic baggies full of water (as you would use to take a pet goldfish home) hanging from the eaves over the front door and surrounding area. Each has 4 or 5 copper pennies in them. The waitress said they frighten off wasps, but darned if I can remember how they are supposed to work.
Click to expand...

Snopes lists this as undetermined looks like a job for the Myth Busters.
 
The wasp activity here has ramped up in the last three years or so. They're unusually aggressive, too.
 
I like wasps. Apart from the fact they are quite beautiful the sight of creatures thousands of times their bodyweight flapping histrionically in classrooms and pub gardens has caused me hours of amusement - especially since I found out that they are apparently attracted to rapid movement.

I've never been stung picking wasps up in order to put them outside and out of harms way - which I do quite regularly - and a couple of years ago I shared the room my computer is in with a wasps nest that had been built inside the window surround. I was only stung once, when I leant on one, after which the patch of psoriasis I'd had for years on my left elbow completely disappeared and has never returned. Maybe they are more useful than we think.
 
After only seeing 1 or 2 wasps over the whole summer, I found about a dozen of them crawling on my car a couple of weeks ago. I suppose they might have liked the colour (it's red)-still weird though. They all seemed 'end of summer dozy', I tried to shoo as many off as possible but one hardy soul ended up falling foul of the windscreen wipers as he (or she I guess) just wouldn't move.
 
I was only stung once, when I leant on one, after which the patch of psoriasis I'd had for years on my left elbow completely disappeared and has never returned. Maybe they are more useful than we think.
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How very interesting. :D
Bee stings're s'posed to be good for rheumatism, so I wonder if we should be looking at wasps and psoriasis?
 
I had a wasp in the helmet this morning,
fnar!!!

riding along and suddenly ride through a huge crowd of them all hanging about under this tree and one went into the vent in my helmet and I could feel it buzzing around, all very nasty. :?
 
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