Monika Leininger
mleinin1@uwyo.edu
Bees are cute, fuzzy, hungry little creatures that only have intention to go from flower to flower looking for delicious pollen to eat. Despite the bee’s valuable objectives, they are trivial in comparison to their vicious, violent and brutal insect counterparts, the wasp.
The most common wasps are paper wasps, hornets and yellow jackets. Wasps preform the same duty to nature as bees. Wasps are pollinations. Pollination is the process that takes place when an insect picks up pollen when visiting one beautiful flower and transfers it to another enabling fertilization and reproduction.
There is scientific evidence to show that the first honeybees actually evolved from their wasp ancestors. We are able to track this transformation by studies of insects trapped in resin.
According to an article written by Dave Goulson, outlining the history of bees, we only saw the first appearance of bees a mere 130 million years ago. This existence is rather unsubstantial in comparison to the wasp’s presence since the prehistoric era.
Bees have learned a regimen of bringing home pollen to feed their young, which then creates honey. Wasps have yet to develop any domestic sense of the sort.
Wasps will feed themselves first at the flowering angiosperm, but at times they have been known to show a mercy and bring home paralyzed victim insects to their children for dinner.
Sure, we all love honey and we know that we won’t be able to buy “wasp honey” in any grocery stores. But what do we, as a culture, love more than sweet, delectable dessert-like substance? Violence! Wasps are the most malicious and unforgiving of all creatures.
Wasps eat several other invertebrate insects. Their diet can consists of ants, flies, beetles, spiders and caterpillars. That’s right; wasps eat our beloved caterpillars.
There has never been an insect that adults and children adore more than beautiful butterflies and wasps are out devouring every to-be butterfly that they set eyes on.
The violence doesn’t just stop at wolfing down a caterpillar whole in a matter of seconds. Most wasps are parasitoids, which means that wasps are able to poke holes in an insect and lay their eggs inside the body.
The baby wasp grubs, will grow and feed on the most unessential organs of the insect to keep it as a living host. Then one day, when the wasp larvae have gained enough strength, the larvae will erupt from the insect, killing the insect entirely and leaving a bludgeoned corpse that the larvae will most likely consume as well.
The fearlessness of the wasps continues because wasps are predatory in nature. These miraculous insects are capable of killing bees and eating their hard-earned honey.
Wasps have sharp enough mouthparts that they can literally cut a bee in half. A wasp will watch honeybees from afar and once they see one resting or cleaning itself, the wasp will ambush the bee and disassemble the bee entirely.
According to nurturingnature.com, wasps will first remove the bee’s wings, then its thorax and abdomen. Chewing up the body in the process, the wasp will sometimes bring remainders of the kill back to the nest for the young larvae.
If you think that the ability to parasitize other insects and take down evolved versions of themselves as the sharpest tool in the wasp’s toolbox, you’re wrong.
What might be the most terrifying piece of information about wasps, by far, is that they are visual creatures and have the ability to preform facial recognition.
They have the strong skill to remember visual landmarks, such as bitten leaves and damage to plants as a sign of nearby prey, but a recent study uncovered that wasps remember each other’s faces and possibly human faces.
According to arstechnica.com, an article written by Kate Shaw Yoshida suggests that “Since there is more than one queen in each nest, having a hierarchy becomes important; wasps must learn who is who in order to avoid conflict and keep the colony stable.”
Wasp’s cognitive ability, predatory nature and parasitic ability is by far dominant to the capacity of the “sweet” and “cute” bees. Wasps are intrinsically badass and this cutthroat, no prisoner’s attitude, is essential concept to evolution.
It’s starting to make sense why the population of honeybees is slowly disappearing and wasps continue to thrive.
