Why are wasps such b......ds?

Wasps, the comedy villain of the insect world that [nearly] everyone hates.

I dislike them because a few years ago I had a queen, called Barbie, that produced wonderfully calm productive bees and she was the star of the show when I took her to markets in an observation hive. One morning I thought there were a few more wasps around her hive than normal and when I came back in the afternoon the wasps had taken over the hive killing the colony.

But why are they such b....ds?

Unlike honey bees wasps don't die when they sting you. Honey bees have a barb on their stinger that means when they try to escape they disembowel themselves. Wasps have a smooth stinger and can sting you many times.

In the early part of the year wasps are fairly placid and like honey bees will only sting when provoked.

Later in the year things change and apparently its because of the unusual ecology and bizarre anatomy of social wasps,

In the spring, queen wasps wake from hibernation and start to build their nest, laying eggs and raising their first brood of daughters. These worker wasps cannot produce fertilised eggs, so spend their time helping their mother to expand the nest and raise more young."

The worker wasps then go in search for soft-bodied invertebrates [wasps are carnivores unlike honey bees which are vegetarian] to give to developing larvae.

Bizarrely, adult wasps cannot digest the food they catch because their gut is so constricted by their thin 'wasp waists. Instead the workers chew up the prey and feed it to the larvae. In return, the larvae produce a sugar-rich spit that the workers can drink.

The colony will go on expanding throughout the summer until the queen decides to produce males and new queens. After these 'reproductives' have left the nest, the old queen stops laying. This means the workers no longer have access to larvae.

Instead, they live on the sugar produced by rotting fruit. This can be a problem because fermenting fruit contains alcohol, so wasps can become intoxicated and rather irritable.

We still hate them though, don't we?