FACTORALY - E49 WASPS

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Not many people like wasps, and when you learn more about them, their reproduction can be a bit gross. But they're every bit as useful as bees. And there are ways to avoid being annoyed by them. Go to the blog to find out how. https://www.factoraly.com/blog Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

hello simon hello bruce how are you today i'm excellent thank you very much marvelous glad to hear it how are you enjoying the heat uh the heat is good, except in my booth it's getting, it's up to 27 degrees in here. Is it really? Yes. How are you anyway? I apologise. No, that's quite all right. I'm all right. I'm ticking along nicely. Yeah, equally hot. So by way of introduction, if anyone's listening for the first time, I'm Simon Wells. I'm Bruce Fielding.

We're both professional voiceover artists. And we work in little rooms. We do. Lots of padding on the walls. Exactly yeah so small space lots of very dense acoustic foam. We can't have air con on because it's noisy and our microphones pick it up. Sounds like this. Yeah you can't have that. No. That's not on. You can't have that. That would be a bad thing. So voiceover artists all across the land start complaining at this time of year and talking about, oh, I stuffed a wet tea towel into the freezer last night and I've draped it over my shoulders and I feel fresh as a daisy and that will last for all of ten minutes.

Apparently, if you put cold socks on your feet, that helps. Does it really? Keep socks in the fridge. Right. Trying that one next time. Thank you. Anything we can go for. You know that old thing of, you know, think about your dog and crack the window open in your car?

Yes. Or give your postman a nice fresh bottle of water if they look rather parched. Yes. I feel there needs to be some kind of public safety announcement for voiceovers. I don't think people would buy it. Probably not. No. No.

So what are we doing here in our hot, sweaty little booths, Bruce? What we would normally do is encourage people to buy things, do things, see things, say things. But today we are recording an episode of a podcast. A podcast? Which podcast would that be then? They know because they've already clicked on the link, haven't they? Of course they have, yeah. Good point. You know it's called Factorily. Yeah.

Yeah. And if you've read the bios, you know who we are. You know what we do. You know what this is about. This is – how would you describe F the bios, you know who we are. You know what we do. You know what this is about. How would you describe Factorially, Simon? Two nerds talking about random stuff. Yes. For about half an hour.

Give or take. Depending on how big the subject is. We either make it less or make it more. Yes. Yes. It turns out there are just interesting facts all over the place. There are. You could look at the most dull item.

The most annoying thing in the world. The most irritating thing which nobody wants to talk about ever. Especially at picnics and things like that. Indeed, yeah. Today's subject, we're talking about wasps. We are. I would like to start off by saying You're allergic to wasps I'm not allergic to wasps I have no Well I don't love them

Who loves them? But I don't have a particular problem with them I hadn't realised that there are Quite a number of Svexophobes in the world What people who don't like spectacles? Svexophobia is the fear of wasps okay um which comes from sfex is the greek word for a wasp and phobia is the greek word for a phobia yeah um and uh it never really occurred

to me they're annoying they're irritating we don't really like them it never really occurred to me that that anyone was you know particularly afraid of them. But there are quite a lot of people who are. So straight off the bat, if you are indeed a sexophobe, now might be the time to switch off. Sorry. Yes. But we are going to tell you how good they are. I mean, I started off this research thinking, bloody wasps. But actually, I finished this research going actually quite good and and not that different to bees no no that's

true go on then so what what positive attributes of a wasp have you discovered that you didn't know before um well i discovered that they are big pollinators i mean you know like pretty much the same as bees yeah i mean bees look fluffier, so therefore more pollen is attracted to them. Yes. But actually wasps have the same work ethic as bees. Yes. They're quite good at it, actually. They are very good.

I mean, they live in hives or nests, equivalent thing. Some of them make honey. Do they? I didn't come across that. Yes, there's a honey wasp. Really? In Australia. I didn't know that. There's all stuff in Australia. Learning stuff already. I also learned that the

most common wasp in America is the European wasp. Is it? Yes. Can't they get their own? But they are absolutely fascinating creatures. They have, as you mentioned, bees being fluffy. So they just kind of accidentally pollinate by virtue of sitting on a flower and the pollen gets stuck to them.

Wasps actually seem to have a special tool for it. They sort of have a probing implement that sticks out their rear end-ish, kind of between their legs, that gathers up pollen and sort of holds it in a little sack. Because wasps are quite smooth and shell-like, so pollen doesn't stick to them, but they do have this little implement that does the job. And they don't live, I mean, the thing is they live on sugars. So they don't live on nectar, for example, which bees,

so flowers attract bees because the nectar attracts them and then they go past the stamen and all that stuff. Whereas a wasp is doing it for the good of humanity. For the greater good. Well done, wasps. Good on you, wasps. They tend to be vegetarians. Right. They only drink sugar, basically.

They eat sugar. Unless they've got young to feed, in which case they do kind of go and kill a few aphids and bits and bobs. Yeah, so I found this. So one of the first things that I always quote when people say, what on earth is the point of wasps? They're actually quite good predators. They hunt caterpillars and aphids

and all the things that could potentially do vast amounts of damage to crops. Yes. Farmers like wasps. Farmers love them, yeah, yeah. It's sort of estimated that if wasps suddenly weren't around and before anything else got the chance to take their place in the food chain,

all the caterpillars and aphids would eat all the crops. We would have almost nothing left at all. So wasps are quite important. But as you say, the grown-up wasps don't actually eat the things that they kill. They feed them to their young. So part of the life cycle of the wasp, once an egg has been laid and hatched and becomes a larva, they eat the insects that the grown-ups bring them. But the grown-ups are only interested in sugar.

So that's why we get the lovely little creatures buzzing around our jam sandwiches in summer. Wasp larvae are not nice. Are they not? No. I mean, they're a bit parasitic. Oh, OK. They will grow inside things, like eyes and stuff. Oh, no.

Yeah, they're parasitoids. And there are 6,000 species of parasitoid wasps in the UK. Are there really? Loads and loads and loads of parasitoid wasps in the UK. Are there really? Loads and loads and loads of parasitoid wasps. Crikey. Yeah. They grow in everything. They actually grow in caterpillars.

So a caterpillar will be impregnated with wasp eggs. Right. And the eggs will hatch inside the caterpillar. Well, that's rather invasive, isn't it? The thing about wasps and bees, actually, is that it's only the females that sting. Right. The males don't sting. Okay.

They don't have a sting. Right. I had a look at how things work in terms of wasp colonies and inside the nests and everything. The vast majority of wasps we see are actually females. Yes. So a single queen wasp will build a nest. Essentially, they're made of paper because the wasp chews up wood, either from trees or even from your garden fence, and makes this sort of woody pulp to build this nest.

So they're essentially made of paper. Yes. Do they do origami? Bit of paper cutting. Just going back to the episode we did on paper. Absolutely. And yeah, so she builds this nest all on her own and then has a load of offspring

and then those offspring get offspring can i just can i just say the reason why she builds it all on her own is that the drones the males live for one day really and the last thing you want to do if you live for one day is to be a carpenter i mean there there are other things on your mind right so they're there to procreate and then job done wow what a life so yeah so the queen

starts off in this nest on her own by the end of the summer season the population of that nest will have grown to around 8 to 10,000 wasps in one nest which is why it's a bad idea to go and poke a wasp nest there's000 to 10,000 wasps in one nest. That's a lot of wasps. Which is why it's a bad idea to go and poke a wasp nest.

Yes. That's an awful lot of angry wasps. Do you know the Dangerous Animals Act? No, I don't. So there's a Dangerous Animals Act, and it quantifies what counts as dangerous. Okay. And officially, something is dangerous if its sting is worse than two wasp stings. In succession or together?

Together. Right, so if you get stung twice… If it's twice as bad as a… Right, okay. Yeah. So technically, anything that stings you once and it hurts as badly as if a wasp has stung you twice, that counts as a dangerous animal. Wow. Yeah.

I would be intrigued to see someone sitting there deliberately getting stung by a wasp twice and then being bitten by a dog and going, it's not quite as bad. That's a bite though, not a sting. Oh, good distinction. It's equality of sting. Yes, okay, fine. On that note, I've found, I love it when there are specific scales for things. Do you remember our episode on curry? Oh, yes.

You talked about the… The Scoble. Scoble, thank you. I was going to say Richter scale. There is a sting pain index created by a fellow called schmidt um and um yeah the the chili pepper scale you you brought up on the curry episode it had loads and loads and loads of different grades didn't it yes it did from one to a million yeah not quite a million but no more this um this schmidt's sting pain index has a grand total of four.

It's a scale of one to four. Does it kind of go, oh, ow, uh, or? And then death. Ah! Something like that. There's a particular description that he has written. He's actually, again, I don't know if he personally is deliberately stinging himself with insects and then sort of writing down what he finds, but there's a quote. This is particularly about a nasty wasp called the tarantula hawk wasp.

That sounds like it's going to be nasty. It's going to be nasty. It's called tarantula because it kills tarantulas. Yeah, it's quite nasty it's a couple of inches in length okay it's like a hornet yeah yeah it's just it's just about the same size of a hornet yeah it's sting is massive um and essentially it's uh you talked about parasitic wasps so this thing preys on tarantulas it paralyzes the tarantula with its sting, drags it off to a specially prepared burrow in the ground, lays one single egg in it, the egg hatches, turns into a larva, eats the tarantula

whilst it's still alive but paralyzed. Fun times. But anyway, Schmidt on his sting pain index wrote about this particular wasp. The pain is immediate excruciating unrelenting and it simply shuts down one's ability to do anything except scream isn't that wonderful he says mental discipline simply does not work in these situations yeah i can believe that um but this scale one to four uh number one is things like small bees and fire ants. Number two is things like larger bees and yellow jackets, which is sort of a nickname for the average everyday yellow and black wasp. Yes. Number three, red paper wasps and Klug's velvet ant.

I've heard of that. And number four is bullet ants and this tarantula hawk wasp. So avoid those. Yes. There are some interesting names for wasps. There are. I mean, etymologists are just nuts. There's a guy called Arnold Menker.

Oh, okay. Who discovered a wasp that's called the Aha wasp. Really? Yes. Because basically he looked at stuff and went, Aha. Okay, fine. Are you sure he wasn't just listening to some 1980s synth pop at the time? No.

There's also nicknames for wasps as well. Oh, yes. Go on. In Devon, they call wasps apple drains. Apple drains? Yes. Do they? Apparently, because when they get into an apple, it Apple drains? Yes. Do they? Apparently because they sort of like,

when they get into an apple, it looks like they're sucking all the sugar out of it. So they're sort of draining the apple. That sounds vaguely cute and quaint, doesn't it? Yeah, well it's Devon, isn't it? Yeah, that's nice. There are an awful lot of varieties. There are social wasps and antisocial wasps.

Yes. The ones we know are the ones that live in colonies and buzz around your food like crazy. There are eight UK species of those type of wasps. But there are thousands and thousands of antisocial or solitary wasps, which don't hang around in colonies. They're just loners. And they don't really look particularly wasp-like.

You sort of see this thing buzzing past and go, what was that? Don't know. Never mind. But yeah, there are thousands of those that we don't even know about. And they don't have to be yellow and black either, do they? No, not at all. They're some really nice colours. Yeah.

That tarantula hawkmoth i mentioned is sort of a dark bluey color with with brown bits oh yeah there are blue ones there are red ones there's one with a with a red uh back end which is apparently like a jewel it's so pretty really yeah wow We're talking about social wasps. In America, there's a group of people called wasps. Right. Which are white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Really? I've never heard that phrase before. Have you never heard of a wasp?

No. Ah. So those very kind of preppy people who kind of think that they have some sort of European heritage. Gotcha. And they're probably from Boston or something like that. And they act very sort of superior. They're called wasps. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Never knew that. I also never knew that there is a woman's fashion style called the wasp waist. Yes. I'd never heard of this. It's very, very familiar. It's one of those things that people used to sort of, it was basically a way of corseting yourself so that you got down to a very, very small, like a six-inch waist.

Yes. I can't remember exactly. Very unhealthy. You see these almost caricatures of women whose bodily organs have been moved about inside them to accommodate this really small waist. Yeah, just over a period of time of having your waist drawn in so much by this corset and girdle. Yeah, it's not healthy. Wouldn't advocate that at all.

No. But it was named the wasp waist because if you look at a wasp, they look like they're in two parts with this very, very narrow bit in between. And I had a quick look at the anatomy of a wasp. And through this very, very narrow section, its organs sort of carry on going through that. So its nerve cord goes through that. Its stomach tubing going through that so it's its nerve cord goes through that um its stomach tubing goes through that and so does its heart so oh a wasp has a long thin heart that runs almost the whole length of its body right um rather than you know what we would recognize as yes yeah and um this thing runs through that that little central the The waisted bit. The waisted bit, yeah.

I will, again, if Bruce is willing, you can probably find a picture of this anatomy on factorally.com. Of course. There are aeroplanes that have wasp waists as well. Are there? Yeah, there are aeroplanes that have, it's like a delta-shaped wing, but the body kind of is pinched just before the tail.

Oh, I see. So it's called a wasp-waisted plane. Right. I mean, we talked about them being useful. Yeah. In Amsterdam, I think. Sorry, in the Netherlands. Definitely in the Netherlands.

They once tried using them as sniffer wasps. You're kidding. No. They trained them to sniff out drugs. Really? And so these wasps would congregate where there were drugs. And they were non-stinging wasps, apparently. Right.

Now, come on, team. Avoid that jam sandwich over there. Go straight for the drugs. Very good. That's fantastic. Wasps are rather old. I mean, not the ones that live for only one day, obviously, but wasps as a whole. Fossils have been found of wasps dating back to the Jurassic period.

Okay. So they've been around for about as long as as dinosaurs um and they're obviously very very good at what they do they don't have an awful lot of natural predators because of the the great big sting sticking out of their tails um and these stings are there for protection they're they're not they're not mean they're not malicious they don't deliberately go after you just for funsies um it's it's self-defense and as we've mentioned with certain wasps it's all in order to you know paralyze their their prey um and i had a quick think about the fact there's sort of this idea that wasps are meaner than bees yes there's sort of what there's waspish behavior is waspish behavior

yes exactly and and i sort of i I think that, at least in part, this comes from the fact that bees, there's this old thing, isn't there, that the bees sting you once and then die. It's an absolute last resort. Whereas a wasp can sting you again and again and again and it looks like it's just having fun and therefore it's malicious.

Yes, yeah, because it doesn't have a barb at the end of its sting. No, so that's what I found out out i'd never really realized why bees died after stinging you um it's because their their stings are barbed and that's perfectly fine for the majority of the things that they sting but when they sting a human which has thicker skin the barb gets stuck and in order to get away from you it actually has to rip the back end of its um abdomen off yes in order to get away and it bleeds to death yeah yuck um wasps don't have that problem they have thin pointy slender smooth stings and therefore they can have at you as many times as they feel the need but only ever in self-defense yes Yes.

They get everywhere, don't they, wasps? They do. There's about a million wasps per square mile in the UK. Whoa, a million wasps per square mile? Yeah. Heck. Yeah, that's a lot. That's a lot of wasps.

And they're all over the world apart from Antarctica. There are so many species that are everywhere except Antarctica. I feel sorry for Antarctica. It doesn't have much biodiversity, does it? Not a lot. There's quite a few mosquitoes and things like that there, but there's no wasps. So if you are the phobia that Simon mentioned at the beginning... Spexophobia.

Thank you very much. Then go to Antarctica and you'll never see another wasp again. Well, there you go. Problem solved. There are ways of deterring wasps if you have a bit of a wasp problem in your garden. Not so good for when you're out on a picnic because you can't control the environment around you to such an extent but um wasps have quite a good sense of smell and there are there are a number of smells that they really really hate so they hate the smell of peppermint and of lemon so you can sort of buy wasp deterrents that you you can buy anti-wasp or anti-bee candles, which are sort of, I was going to say limoncello.

That's a liqueur, isn't it? Citronella. Citronella. You can buy citronella candles that smell of lemon and deter the wasps. Yeah. Or you can just plant those plants in your garden. Yes. I had a bit of a wasp problem a while ago and I bought a fake wasp nest. I bought this sort of cloth bag that was grey.

Yes. And you hung it from wherever. Yeah. And this thing was supposed to tell the local wasps, there's already a colony here, don't bother. It didn't work. I just had wasps flying around the thing. But generally speaking, people make a big fuss about wasps.

They really only come out in September. Yes, late summer. That's when they're big. Yeah. There's not many portrayals of them in literature. No, I suppose not. That just shows our general hatred for the things, doesn't it? I think so.

I mean, the only place that I was able to find it mentioned in literature was in Alice Through the Looking Glass. Okay. And there's a giant wasp in a wig. Oh yes you're right. I can picture that now. You may be able to picture it but the guy who illustrated the book, John Tennille

couldn't. Right. Because he never re-illustrated it. Okay. Go through with that again then. He told Lewis Carroll this thing is too ridiculous to illustrate so it's talked about but not actually illustrated in the book oh that's fantastic crikey i mean of all the things that go on in alice through the looking glass the one thing that the guy refused to draw was a wigged wasp. Yeah.

There are other things named after wasps. Janet Van Dyne, for example. What? She's the wasp. She first appeared in Tales to Astonish in 1962. Okay. She's like, they've portrayed her in Marvel movies. movies oh as in ant-man and the wasp exactly oh i see exactly i know who you're talking about now yes they marvel kind of changed the story a bit yes yeah janet van dyne and and there are things called

wasps as well which you probably know quite well um i don't know why i'm looking around my booth as that's as if that's going to be the answer it won't be in your boot it might be in your garage oh we're talking about vespers aren't we we're talking about vespers made by piaggio and they are brilliant and they started making them in 1946 just after the second world war um and there are about 18 million um vespas around these days there are companies that copy the scooter but it was made famous in a in a film which is one of my favorite films called roman holiday okay uh with audrey hepburn ah yes okay and she's on the back of a of a vespa with her white her white shawl blowing in the wind.

Yes, exactly. She looks super cool. And that film did more for sales of Vespas than anything else. Brilliant. And they used him filming quite a lot. They used his kind of like vehicles to get you from place to place on a set. Charlton Heston, when he wasn't driving a chariot on Ben-Hur, could easily be seen on a Vespa going from set to set in Chinuchita.

Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, that's really interesting. I hadn't realised until I started looking into wasps that that's where the name Vespa comes from. Ah. So I usually do this at the beginning, but I'll throw it in now. The name wasp, it's it's an annoying

name it comes from the old english wasp which means wasp it's one of those things again that didn't go on a terribly imaginative etymological journey um but it formed around the same time as the latin equivalent vespa there's a suggestion that the word wasp and weave might be connected because of the way in which its nest is made but that's a bit far-fetched but yeah i hadn't realized that vespa was the you know latin equivalent of of wasp and that that sort of leads me to question is the scooter called a vespa simply because of the the droning noise that it makes i think it's in and out quickly yeah i think it's the way it moves and the noise right definitely i mean they they it just suits the thing so well it's interesting

isn't it because i i'd never tweaked that before so i've always thought of a vespa as being a really cool classy you know very very sexy kind of scooter now i'm just thinking of it as an annoying little buzzing thing getting in your way. I think it's ruined it for me. I found out about a particular species, well, several species of wasp called fig wasps. Fig wasps?

Oh, those ones who live inside figs? Yes, exactly that. And essentially there are as many fig wasps as there are varieties of fig. Oh. There are around a thousand different varieties of fig. And each variety has its own personal variety of fig wasp. They do tend to be quite parasitical. Yes, they are.

Yeah. They live off other things and grow inside them. Yeah. So the way a fig wasp works, so a fig wasp lays its eggs in a fig. Yep. The nutrients of the fig feed the egg turning into a larva, so there's no need to get stuff from outside. If it's a female and it has wings, then it goes off and pollinates and does lots of waspy stuff. Yep.

If it's a male, the majority of the time the males don't have wings. They just live in the fig. And similar to your earlier fact about them just living one day for procreation purposes. That's it. So this thing is born, lives, mates, and then dies inside a fig. Never sees the light of day. And then its carcasses sort of reabsorbed, its nutrients are reabsorbed into the fig. So there's this kind of symbiotic relationship between the fig and the fig wasp.

Can I just give a quick... Yes, you may. You certainly may. I mean, I like figs. I like figs. There was a myth going around for quite a long time that the crunchy bits inside a fig are actually the dead parts of a wasp. They're not. They're not.

They're the seeds. They're fig seeds. Yes. As I say, the wasp is entirely absorbed back into the fig and therefore there's no issue of that ever happening. But how interesting. I wonder who was the first wasp that landed on a fig and went, do you know what? I like it here. I'm going to lay eggs in this.

I'm going to start a whole subspecies. They're weird things. Yeah. So we're now at the point in the podcast where I say to Simon. So, Simon, any records? It's so predictable, isn't it? We found a formula. It works. Not many, actually.

The best record I found... Strongest wasp? God, what would you measure that against? Able to lift what? I don't know. So other than the world's largest wasps, which are actually hornets, hornets are a sub-variety of wasp, there's a variety of hornet called the Asian giant hornet,

which does exactly what it says on the tin. It's really big and it lives in Asia. This thing is between two and three inches in length. Okay. That's quite long. It's basically as long as your finger. It's weird. You can't see this.'s basically as long as your finger. It's weird. You can't see this.

No, we're both doing it. We're both sticking our fingers out and going, crikey, that's a heck of a wasp. Brilliant. But yes, other than that, I found a record for the world's biggest wasp nest. Okay. This was found in Auckland, New Zealand.

It was 3.75 meters tall. That's 10 feet. That's me and a half. So that's quite a big wasp nest. That's a big wasp nest. So do they drop? They're hanging from it. This is hanging from a tree.

This was hanging from a tree. It eventually fell off because it was just so heavy. Yes. And therefore it was it was discovered it was you know quite high up and hadn't been noticed until it fell to the ground one day wow um and uh this contained a species of wasp called german wasps uh even though it was in new zealand this is like the european wasps in america in america yes exactly they get around they do get around um and uh if if the average wasp nest contains around 10,000 wasps, this nest contained between 100,000 and 200,000 wasps.

What? It was quite big. I haven't been able to find out what happened when it burst open upon hitting the ground. I hope it was old and redundant and didn't cover the local town in wasps. But yeah, quite impressive. redundant and didn't cover the local town in wasps um but yeah so as as a public service i will put a thing in the show notes that tells you how to get rid of a wasp nest without killing the wasps oh great well done good stuff there are ways of doing it well i think that brings me to the end of my notes about wasps. How about you, Bruce?

Yep, I'm pretty much there when it comes to the sting in the tail. OK, shall we buzz off then? All right then. Well, thank you ever so much for listening. If you've enjoyed listening to us go on about wasps for half an hour, please tell your friends about it. Please share us on your social media platforms. Please give us a lovely shiny five-star rating and a review. So thank you all for coming. Please do join us again next time for

another fun-filled episode of Factorily. Goodbye. Au revoir.