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Wonderful Wasps - Wasp Facts

Did you know that not all wasps are black and yellow striped? The majority of them do a great job at pollinating plants and controlling the number of insect pests in the garden.

What's the point of wasps?

  • Wasps eat flies, aphids, caterpillars and other invertebrates, making them an important insect-controlling predator.
  • Wasps are amazing architects, building paper nests from chewed up wood.
  • Wasps are master crafts-women (all workers are female). The nest is made up of combs of hexagonal paper cells.
  • Wasp nests provide a home for some of our most beautiful, pollinating hoverflies.

Wasps can be beautiful

There are hundreds of species of wasps in the UK, the majority of which feed their young (larvae) on other insects. Wasps come in a variety of colours, shapes and sizes, ranging from large, black and yellow striped species to tiny metallic red and green species.

Chrysis ruddii
A tiny metallic red and green wasp (Chrysis ruddii) © Roger Key

Ants, Bees and Wasps are insects in the order Hymenoptera – meaning ‘membranous wings’. Ants, bees and wasps that have a sting or use their 'stinger' for laying eggs fall into a group called ‘Aculeata’. Within this group lie the social wasps, solitary wasps and cuckoo wasps.

Social wasps

There are only eight species of social wasp. These include the hornet and ‘jam pot’ wasps that are among the most familiar of all our British insects, with queens and workers developing colonial nests.

Vespa crabro

A hornet, the 'gentle giant' of the wasp world. They are brilliant pest-controllers, amazing architects and great recyclers – eating up rotten fruit that has fallen to the ground. (Vespa crabro) © Roger Key

Why are social wasps after my picnic?

Towards the end of the summer wasps are seen more frequently as they hunt for sweet food. They are sometimes considered a nuisance to humans as they try to feed on sugary drinks and jam sandwiches. The wasps are looking for a sugar fix! In late summer the adults are prioritising and feeding the young male wasps in hope that they will fertilise a new queen who will found a new generation. However, around the time of the first winter frost the nest begins to break down and the grubs that the worker wasps once tended to have now grown up. The grubs no longer secrete the sugary liquid they once did to feed the adult workers. The nest is in anarchy and each wasp is out for itself on the hunt for sugar!

Solitary wasps

There are around 260 species of solitary wasp (do not live in social groups, and even though some live close together there is no social structure). Some of these wasps are excellent pollinators and play an important role in the web of life.

Ammopila sabulosa

Many solitary wasps specialise on a single species or group insects. The female paralyses the prey with her sting and places it in the nest as food for her larva. A sand digger wasp carrying a paralysed grub to its burrow. (Ammophila sabulosa) © Roger Key

Cuckoo wasps

A small proportion of wasps are cuckoos on other wasps or their nests.

Wasp Relatives

There are two groups of Hymenoptera that do not possess a sting– sawflies and parasitic wasps. Sawflies lack a narrow waist, while parasitic wasps have thinner, threadlike antennae with more than 16 segments and the egg-tube of the females is frequently very long and easily visible (sometimes this is used as a defensive weapon, but there is no venom).