The classic scooter, the Vespa, launched in 1946, is Italian for “wasp”, a name that might have been chosen because the noise it makes would irritate tourists.
Wasps can certainly be irritating, or worse if you are stung, and worse still if you are allergic to them. But they are also important pollinators, predators of garden pests, and a food source for some other insects and even for some birds and animals.
Walking along the footpath next to the aggregate recycling site the other day, we looked up and saw a perfect wasps’ nest hanging from the upper branches of a hawthorn tree above our heads. It was a triumph of engineering hidden from view until the hawthorn leaves had fallen. Since then, the November rains have gradually turned it to wet rags.
This summer, we had wasps’ nests in two of our plant pots, one outside the front door and the other immediately outside the sliding kitchen door. For a while we tolerated them, and they mostly minded their own business. But the imminent visit of a two-year-old grandchild forced us to act, and we called on Reece from Pest UK.
We did not want to kill them all, however. Reece dealt with the nest in the pot we couldn’t move. We waited until dusk to move the other pot, taking not our life but our pain threshold into our own heavily gloved hands, and depositing it a safe distance away before rapidly retreating. I continued to water the plant during the drought at fully extended arm’s length, but my timidity probably led to its death. The wasps survived and were still there at the beginning of November, their sentries positioned at the convenient drainage holes at the bottom of the pot.
Wasps deserve our respect, for both the positive and the negative things they do for us, or to us, but it is unlikely that many of us will transcend feelings of ambivalence, at best, towards them – as this poem written 16 years ago tries to encapsulate:
Wasp, ancient enemy of the Britons,
how your collective memory must rage
at repeated bipedal injustice:
the way we induce you into blue light
at the baker’s, to fizz and vaporise;
or, with shock and awe, incinerate your
papyrus city; or, more ruthless still,
lay poison across the vespine threshold.
And yet you exact your revenge in this
asymmetric warfare, sending scouts out
to our picnic tables, pubs and tea rooms
to curdle the milk of our contentment,
or dive from overhead lights in crowded
trains like stukas, strafing the passengers.
When the venom in your belly injects
into flesh or bursts beneath a rolled up
paper, your pheromones communicate
to fellow wasps, burning for the battle.