Waspman

Forget the superhero movies, wasps don’t get a good press. They’re always in your beer in the pub garden, buzzing aggressively around summer barbecues and trying to get at anything sweet in the kitchen the moment you leave a window open.

Quite frankly they need a redesign, a complete makeover. They need to bring in the marketing consultant responsible for bumble bees and ask, ‘what are we doing wrong?’

Bumble bees are roughly the same colour, buzz about the garden in an erratic fashion, but people love them. If people find they’ve got a bumble bee nest in their garden, they’re curious and tolerant. “Hey everyone, we’ve got a bumble bee nest in our garden.”

Should they find they’ve got a wasp’s nest within their domain it’s straight down to the garden centre with a siren on the roof to buy a 1kg pack of Die-Die-Die-Wasp and administer it once the sun goes down and the delivery system has had three stiff gins.

True, the bastards will sting you.

And with impunity, they’re not like bees who will only sting you if they feel threatened or the hive is attacked. And yes, as a former beekeeper I used to loathe them because they would get in the hive during the late autumn and try and steal the honey. They gave the bees a lot of extra work to do at exactly the time they should be preparing for winter. On one of my hives I had a glass crown board which was in effect the ceiling of the hive. If you took the outer roof off in October, you would always see about 7 or 8 bees chasing a wasp round the top of the hive against the glass, trying to get it out of the building.

With a barbless sting wasps can sting repeatedly. Honeybees have barbed stings, so although they can withdraw it after penetrating chitinous substances, like a wasp’s abdomen, the moment they stick it into the more solid epidermis, that’s them done for, it’s stuck fast.

At college we were told that wasps are very useful earlier in the year because they hunt for protein and will predate aphids and aphid larvae and do everything they can to ignore beer, honey and barbecue sauce. I knew that was true, but I’d never seen any real evidence to support the theory until this year when I grew a whole bed of kale and didn’t put a net over it (as Monty and Frances have advised in successive weeks of GW)

I know moths have incredible senses of smell, but it didn’t take long for a few cabbage white butterflies to descend upon my ‘all season’ kale. I say a few, it was like I had distilled the essence of cabbage white pheromone at the bottom of the garden and snow had started to fall. Looking under the kale leaves, there were many tell-tale clusters of little yellow eggs.

Looking further around I saw that small holes were beginning to appear in the leaves and that it was already far too late, as Beyonce would say, to put a net on it. At this point that I noticed a few wasps buzzing around the kale leaves, but took nothing of it.

Coming back to the crop a week later I expected to see my four varieties of kale shredded beyond recognition and was planning to grub the bed up and put in something else. I was shocked to find that it had hardly changed – still a few holes but more or less, as you were. Looking a bit closer I saw that those darling, lovable, cuddly old wasps were patrolling through the kale leaves and munching any eggs or larvae that they came across. They were my cabbage white enforcers.

So my advice to Monty and Frances – not conventional, I know – is don’t net your brassicas. Instead, support your local wasp community.

It’s the circle of life.