Instant Genius - Why wasps are one of the planet’s most misunderstood insects

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

The truth is, when most of us think of wasps, our minds will likely go to memories of irritating winged pests landing in our drinks when we’re trying to have a nice summer picnic or perhaps one of the times we got a nasty sting when we were out playing in the park as children. It’s fair to say wasps have a pretty bad rap. But if we look more closely, it soon becomes clear that most of us are getting these fascinating insects entirely wrong. As part of our Nature’s Unsung Heroes miniseries, we’re joined by BBC broadcaster, author and entomologist based at the University of Gloucestershire Prof Adam Hart to talk about the many benefits wasps bring to the ecosystems they live in. He tells us how wasps act as the wardens or guardians of our gardens and agricultural land by keeping pests under control, how they act as essential pollinators that help the ecosystems they live in thrive, and how they act as one of the natural world’s most sophisticated architects and engineers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-size masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. The truth is, when most of us think of wasps, our minds will likely go to memories of irritating winged pests, landing in our drinks when we're trying to have a nice summer picnic, or perhaps one of the times we've got a nasty sting

when we were out playing in the park as children. It's fair to say, wasps have a pretty bad rap. But if we look more closely, it soon becomes clear that most of us are getting these fascinating insects entirely wrong. In this episode, part of the Nature's Unsung Heroes miniseries,

we're joined by BBC broadcaster, author and entomologist based at the University of Gloucestershire, Professor Adam Hart, To talk about the many benefits, wasps bring to the ecosystems they live in. He tells us how wasps act as the wardens or guardians of our gardens and agricultural land by keeping pests under control, how they act as essential pollinators to help the ecosystems they live in thrive, and how they act of one of the natural world's most sophisticated architects and engineers.

So welcome to the podcast. for joining us. Thank you for having me on. It's an absolute pleasure. So today we're talking all about wasps. So I would venture most people's experience of wasps is have been ruining the nice summer afternoon in a beer garden, flying in their lager, etc. And it's fair to say that they don't have the best reputation with the wider public. So over the next 30 minutes or so, let's see if we can do something to change their image a bit. But first off, let's get it clear what we're talking about. So what exactly are wasps? You know, how do they fit into the wider insect family tree?

What makes a wasp a wasp? Yeah, so wasps are actually a really complex group. You mentioned earlier, wasps sort of bothering us at picnics. We'll get on to those. But actually those sorts of wasps, the social wasps that live in big colonies, they're actually a minority in the wasps overall. The wasps are actually a very, very diverse group, tens of thousands of species within an order called the hymenoptera.

So within the hymenoptera, you've got wasps, you've got ants, you've got bees, and you've also got the sore flies. And the wasps are sort of, what's the sort of ancestral group of the ants and the bees really? You can think of bees as hairy vegetarian wasps, and ants are basically wingless ground-living wasps. So the wasps have really quite an important group in terms of sort of evolution. What makes a wasp a wasp? Well, obviously you've got two pairs of wings, which you can see quite clearly when they're buzzing around you. They've got the six legs you'd expect of an insect, but they've also got that very tight wasp waist.

you know, it's entered into our vocabulary, that very distinct constriction, that narrowing between the thorax and the abdomen. They've generally got a sting, which is a sort of modified ovipositor, although, you know, that is used to varying different extents in different groups. And I mentioned earlier, some of them are social, but actually the majority of them are solitary. And I would say, on a warm day, if you've had your door open or your windows open, go and look on a window. You've generally got some insects on there, fewer than we might have seen a few decades to go. And often when you look close, you think, oh, it's a fly. If you look closely, you'll often see two pairs of wings instead of one. You know, that's almost certainly a small parasitoid wasp.

And if you look, you may even see a little kind of stinger coming out of the bottom. So there's an incredible diversity of these solitary wasps that kind of escape our notice, largely because those social ones, as you said, and it's the elephant in the room, they can be incredibly annoying. It's a fact. Yeah, so you mentioned that. There's sort of several different kind of categories of wasps. You mentioned a couple there, like the parasitorted wasps and stinging wasps, but a lot of people probably don't know that not all species of wasps actually do sting. No, most of them really aren't any bother to us whatsoever. They may well have a sting that's very effective against things like caterpillars and so on. A lot of them have this kind of habit

of landing on some insect prey, grabbing it, taking it back to a hole somewhere, injecting it through its stinger with some sort of, often quite complex toxins, which we're starting to realize may have some medical benefits to us. It effectively paralyzes the prey and it forms, I mean, the cliche here is it forms a living larder for the larvae. You know, the prey is sort of alive because obviously a caterpillar in a warm hole is going to rot in a matter of hours sometimes. It keeps the food alive and fresh for the larvae to feed on. So, yeah, that sort of habits, very common. I always say to people, whilst wasps are quite unpopular, spiders are also very unpopular. There's a fantastic little group of wasps called the Pompeilid wasps, and they actually

specialize in hunting spiders, and they'll do exactly that to spiders. So that's sometimes, it's an unfortunate, unfortunate for spiders, because I'm always trying to find good news stories for them, but that can be quite a good way of getting people to realize that, that wasps do all sorts of interesting things, too. Yeah, so let's sort of take the idea and run with it then, because one of the, the big things that wasps do in the ecosystems they live in is pest control. So we sort of touched on it there. But you know, can you tell us about that? Yeah, absolutely. And it's something that is completely overlooked. And another thing

that's overlooked, which we'll talk about shortly is pollination too. But in terms of pest control, you know, pest control is a major problem with modern agriculture. We keep throwing pesticides at systems. We know that that's not a good plan, but unfortunately pesticides work, and so consequently we tend to use

them, and then we use more and more of them, and that has all sorts of problems. Actually, wasps are a fantastic natural predator of many of the pests that we get on our crops because many of those crop pests are soft-bodied things like caterpillars. They're the larvae of sometimes sawflies I mentioned earlier. They're the larvae of butterflies and moths and so on, sometimes beetles. And wasps are amazing at picking them off. Not just those wastes that I mentioned earlier, the parasitoid wasps, but also the social wasps, the ones that bother us at picnics. They're amazing at going through crops, going through gardens,

and picking off all of those kind of little bits of caterpillars and grubs and all sorts of other stuff. that we find a pest. Of course a pest is in the eye of the beholder, but nonetheless in many systems there are pests and wasks can be an incredible way of getting rid of them and we overlooked them because they're unfortunate. I always think with wasps, they have this unfortunate fact that for a few weeks of the year and it really is only a few weeks of the year when those colonies get big and it's the end of the summer and, you know, there are a nuisance but they're largely a nuisance because their sort of slightly difficult patch tends to coincide with our summer holidays and a nice bit of weather and we like to sit outside eating things that they like

to eat. So, you know, it's this sort of unfortunate, it's literally just a few weeks of the year where our behaviour and their behaviour intercept in ways that are unfortunate. The rest of the time, they're out there doing incredible things. Yes, so sort of sticking with this pest control idea, can we harness, you know, the behaviour of wasps to prey on these pests in certain areas of agricultural land to help with crop health, for example. Yeah, absolutely. And there are some species of wasps that are actively bred and released onto crops as pest control. So as sort of pest control, particularly actually in greenhouses, they're very useful. But I would say that if you've got some social wasps in your garden, as long as they're not being a major pest to you, they are

absolutely almost certainly going through your garden and removing all kinds of pests that would likely as a gardener be vexing you in some way and you may even be tempted to start using some form of control that that's not going to be particularly effective first of all and is probably going to be damaging overall. So yeah absolutely. All of these things, natural

pest control, we know about ladybirds doing it, right? But ladybirds are lovely, they're cuddly, they're round, they've got spots on and we make up songs about them. Wasps are arguably far more effective pest controllers in terms of what they remove and in terms of the sort of biomass they save by removing it.

But of course, you know, they don't really get good press today. I think they just need better press agents. You know, that's sort of what, so Sirian Sumner and I started the big wass survey. And one of our kind of ideas here was that that would, we would be a better press agent for wasps. We try and get some good stories out there rather than just the classic end of summer or was sort of pain, aren't they? Type of narratives. Yeah. So how about another sort of aspect that might feed into that that you hear about a lot?

in that's with invasive species. So again, can the wasps come to the rescue here? I mean, potentially, yeah, although of course there is a species of was that is now an invasive species that we're concerned about, one of the Asian Hornet species, which has sort of started to appear in the UK and maybe targeting honeybee colonies.

But yeah, wasps as predators are really, really important in ecosystems. I think the importance of predators and ecosystems is often underestimated, because we see predators and they kill things and they eat things and we think, well, yeah, that's not, that can't be so great. Well, actually, by killing and eating things and sort of doing so in a way that prevents any one species becoming particularly common, because if a prey species is super common, predators will start hammering it. It starts to introduce this idea of predators increasing biodiversity and that's a really important ecological function of predators. And when you remove predators from systems and there's lots of examples of this,

you generally do end up with reduced biodiversity overall. So, yeah, having wasps in an ecosystem and having predators in an ecosystem can certainly help with controlling invasive species. I think the main problem is, and I think we've even spoken about this in the magazine before, haven't we, is that with an invasive species, generally by the time you think,

oh, I've got a bit of a problem here, that problem is usually sort of beyond the point where you're going to easily solve it, and that can be one of the issues. but certainly having a robust, good predator's sort of dynamic going on in an ecosystem is never going to be a bad thing. This spring, denim gets a softer, lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you.

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So you'll hear a lot of people say, you know, naively, oh, you know, yeah, I like bees, they're lovely, aren't they cute? And they're essential pollinators. Wasps, they just don't do anything. but that's completely untrue, isn't it? Yes, it is untrue, and it's untrue on lots of levels, because I mentioned earlier about the diversity of wasps, and some species and some groups of wasps are much more effective at visiting flowers than others. And it's true to say that some of the solitary wass are much better than the social wasps.

But social wasps do visit flowers, and they do move around the environment, and we know now from various studies, we don't know enough, but we know now that they do undertake some quite significant. pollination activities in some cases. And there's a fantastic diagram, but it's sort of a huge circle, if you like, of all these sort of flower species, various lines across it and spike spokes on a wheel, but really sort of rich and dense, showing all of these interactions between flowers and between wasps. And, you know, what you realize is that the only thing really limiting those interactions currently are that we haven't studied them on some of those plants. You know,

actually, it seems to be one of those situations where when we look for it, we, sure enough, we we find wasps visiting different groups of flowers. So, yeah, their pollination activities we already know are pretty good. And the more we look at them, the more surprising it is the amount that they do. So sort of related to wasps relationship with plants, I have to ask one question, because for many years it was one of our most searched terms. And that's the relationship between wasps and figs. Fig wasps, yeah. The fig wasp is a very unusual wasp. And again, it shows the diversity of the wasps group. I mean, what happens with fig wastes is you get pollination occurring within the fig and the female fig wasp will sort of lay eggs within the fig. The males and females

emerge. You get mating within the fig. The males are wingless and they don't even leave. And in so doing, they're also pollinating the flowers within the fig. The fig is a very unusual fruit. I mean, we think it might be called a synchomium. I mean, I'm delving back into my, um, my, my memory here and it's basically it's almost like the flowers are sort of enclosed you can imagine the outside of the figs sort of growing around and sort of encasing the flowers and the flowers are actually inside and yeah fig pollination occurs as a consequence of the wasps which which die in there I'm fairly sure that in modern fig production it doesn't 100% rely on those wasps I think they managed to sort of bypass that slightly but but in wild fig systems yeah absolutely and the

fig wasp evolution and the sort of co-evolution with figs is very very tight you know different species of pollinating, different species of fig and so on. And it's an incredible thing. In fact, there was a fantastic BBC documentary. I think it was called something like the Queen of Trees. It was part of that whole natural world. Undoubtedly, David Attenborough would have narrated it. And it was all about the sort of the central importance of those fig trees in some of the

ecosystems they're in and these amazing kind of interactions with wasps. Yeah, really, really fascinating story. So another thing that a lot of people probably won't be aware of is that, that some species of wasps act as kind of refuse collectors of the environments that they live in. Even sometimes eating things like carrion, like decomposer wasps, etc. Yeah, absolutely. I tend to think insects are sort of the glue that holds ecosystems together. They're sort of the invisible glue.

And we think of things like pollination because it's kind of glamorous and we like flowers and bees do it and bees make honey. So we love them. But there's lots of other jobs that go on. And decomposition and nutrient cycling is one of those great overlooked roles. For two reasons. One, it generally happens outside of our sort of purview. You know, we're often not going around staring at dead things getting eaten. And the second thing is it's a bit distasteful, right?

It's not quite as glorious as a beautiful flower or fresh strawberries or whatever. But it's incredibly important. And yeah, what's a big part of that? Social wasps are great carrion scavengers. I mean, they'll land on sort of dead mice and things like that, but they'll also tank dead caterpillars, dead insects and so on. and take them away into their colonies and get fed upon. And then there are, yeah, other species that specialize on doing it too.

But the social wass are particularly fantastic decompos. And again, an overlooked ecosystem service of wasps. So another thing that I think a lot of people won't necessarily won't come to their mind when they first think about wasps is the wasps that borrow and the effects that they can have on soil health. Absolutely. And this also relates to ants too. the opening up an erration of soils is incredibly important. It produces that physical structure.

You can't just have a highly compressed soil. Roots won't be able to penetrate and you don't get sort of penetration of gases and so on, and drainage of water. So anything that buries in the soil is really important for that. And we know about earthworms, and some people, I guess, probably have thought about ants doing that. But yeah, lots of wasps bury into soils and sort of bury into the ground and make little kind of mines in which they put their large. and so on. And yeah, all of that activity helps in terms of not just actually erration of the soil,

but also nutrient cycling, pulling organic material down into the whole cycling things around, really, really important. And depends on the ecosystem. Burying wastes aren't necessarily very common in certain ecosystems, but in places where they're found, particularly things like sand dunes and stuff, they are contributing a really important component of that soil health. Again, one of those overlooked things. I was told once that there are three things that you'll never get people interested in. Nutrient cycling and decomposition, soil and fungi. And yet those three things are the three most crucial things in terms of keeping life on the planet. And it's true. They're overlooked. They're vital. But they can be a bit dull, I guess. I don't know. I think that's pretty interesting. But yeah, I can see why maybe people aren't enormously sort of turned on by the idea of soil and nutrient cycle. but yeah, absolutely crucial and wass a part of that. I think another thing worth pointing out as well, which is a slightly sort of softer idea,

is the kind of ability of certain species of wasps to build these fascinating structures. You know, maybe we can learn things from that about, you know, architectural things and building methods. But, you know, what can we say about that? What sort of wasps build these sort of fascinating sort of geometric structures? Yeah, so those amazing wasthmus are built by the paper-making wasps, And they're predominantly the wasps that come and bother us at picnics.

They're the social wasps, Vespa, Vesbular, Pallisces as well, when you go further south. If you go to France and Spain, you'll see those lovely sort of umbrella-like nests hanging down from reef eaves everywhere. I don't think it's possible to go to a hypermarket and look up and not see hundreds of them around the kind of big, the big sort of eaves that you get on those buildings. And yeah, those structures are incredible. And they're incredible because not just, we look at their construction and we say, they're making these hexagonal things and what an incredible thing. And that's true. But they're incredible when you break down how they're actually doing it.

They're doing it with a mouthful of wood pulp and water that's individually collected and then laid down very, very carefully layer by layer in these structures. But what's really interesting if you take apart a wasp nest is that you've got different types of paper technology, if you like, within that construction. You've got that leafy kind of exterior, the envelope of the nest, which is almost like very thin sheets of paper. It's quite sort of laminar. It's got lots of different layers. It's building up an insulation, actually, in a protection to the nest.

And it's waterproof. You can have it outside and often build nests in hedges and bushes and so on. If you tear through that, and I don't recommend doing that, by the way, when the wass are in it. If you tear through that, you'll see inside the sort of hexagonal cartons

that look a bit like honeycomb. I mean, it's the same basic principle, right? It's convergent evolution going on here. It's a space-filling solution to an engineering problem. And you've got the, these sort of hexagonal columns, they're made from a much stiffer form of paper. So they're adjusting

their technique to produce a different type of structure. And then those sort of honeycombs of paper, they're joined together by these little sort of stems and columns. And that's a different paper technology still. That's a highly structural thing. They're actually making engineering columns that are supporting everything and holding it together. So it's really one of those things, the more you look at it, the more incredible it is. And when you look in close detail, you don't even really need a magnifying glass. You can see these sort of very gentle little crescent shapes around the outside. That's an individual wasps mouthful of pulp that's being used to sort of make it.

And you can start counting them and you can work out just how many trips are involved and the amount of labour that's involved in producing it. And of course, on top of that, it's also a dynamic structure. So they're not making a massive nest and then filling it. They're making a very small nest and then constantly reworking and expanding it to accommodate this sort of growing numbers of. of individuals and the growing numbers of brood that they're producing. So it's absolutely remarkable.

To such an extent, actually, in Japan, they have the giant ornate out there makes these incredible sort of paper structures. And they perfected the technique of getting them to make these structures inside molds, essentially, and then they'll sort of break them out. And you can end up with these phenomenal, architectural, beautiful shapes of wasps, venerated for their absolute precision. When you think about it, it fits in very well. the sort of the idea of being very precise.

If you look at sort of Japanese ivory carving and thing like that, it's incredibly detailed work. And you can sort of see that kind of, you can really see why that form of construction in nature would appeal to them so much. Yeah, so let's sort of have a look at another thing that you said, which is an emerging field of research. And that's the use of wasp toxins in potential medical applications. Because, you know, we've, I mean, we've written in the magazine quite a few times about,

snake venom and things like that, people researching that to find these different new drugs. But, you know, apparently we can do that from wasps as well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the thing is, wasp venom is highly powerful. If anyone's ever been stung by a wasp, even a sort of regular, everyday UK social wasp, it is a profound physiological insult, albeit on a local level. It hurts and it swells up. It's clearly affecting your immune system. You're getting this. kind of histological sort of response to it. Some people swell up a lot.

The pain evolves and develops, so it's clearly having a more complex thing than just stubbing your toe. It's got a molecular level kind of interaction. And that type of thing is always of interest to medical science. On top of that, you've got lots and lots of different wasps around the world.

So, for example, there's a Brazilian wask called Polybia, which I've been stung by, and I have to say it was incredible. I was walking across a pathway and three of them sort of intercepted me as I was walking and stung me on the scalp. And the next thing I knew, I was actually on the ground, on my knees.

It was sort of, it wasn't even pain exactly. It was like, it was like sort of existential trauma. And I was kind of there for about 10 seconds. And I sort of got up and there was no swelling associated with it or anything, but it was an incredibly intense experience. It turns out that toxins from that type of wasp but are able to target fat molecules that are abnormally distributed on cancer cells. So people are starting to look at the idea of these toxins interacting with cancer as a form of chemotherapy.

It seems to leave healthy cells unharmed. There are various peptides that are produced in those stings, particularly of actually common social wasps, that look like they may have some bacterial effect and may be able to be used to combat sepsis, which sort of bypasses some of the problems we have from traditional antibiotic resists. resistance. Some venom peptides have some sort of antiviral properties. There's also some of these, and I mentioned it earlier, some of these neurological interactions is leading people to start thinking whether or not they might be useful for protecting the nervous system in some way or providing

protection against seizure. So there's lots and lots of different kind of threads in medicine that people are looking at. As always with medical science, and I've realized this now, I used to do a sort of a little bit on BBC local radio here of sort of breaking news stories. And I did it for about 10 years. And every software we'd have this amazing medical story and you go, oh, this is really cool and we'll see this scene. It takes a long time, you know, for these sorts of developments to actually become part of everyday medicine for all sorts of reasons, you know, complex reasons often. So I don't think we're going to be seeing sort of wasp inspired chemotherapy agents being widely used just yet. But it's really, really interesting that that's the push

that we're going towards. And the idea of using, yeah, as you say, snake venom, you know, it's fairly, that's fairly old now. But now we're starting to write it all scorpion venom. Spider venom is also being investigated, wasps. You know, starting to realize that some of these natural compounds could be incredibly useful. So sort of, by way of summary then, sort of having said all that,

hopefully, like the next time someone's on a picnic and a wasp lands on their fond and fancy or in their lemonade, maybe they'll give it a bit of thought and think, you know, perhaps we should give these guys a bit more credit than they're getting. Yeah, I hope so. I'd also say, right, the number of times that I've been in a beer garden or at someone's house or whatever, and everyone's complaining about the was. And obviously I'm about and said, well, can't you do something about these wastes? And I go out and it's actually honeybees because people aren't very good at identifying these things. And most people think a bumblebee is a sort of honeybee because, I mean, they're even portrayed like that on the advert sometimes. And I look there and I say, listen, these are actually honeybees.

They're still a problem, I grant you, right? I'm not one of those people that sort of sits there getting stung and goes. It's all great. Absolutely. Sometimes these insects can be a real nuisance and they can actually be a hazard and, you know, we do have to sort of take some action. But sometimes it's not wasps at all. It's a was getting the blame for honeybees.

But yeah, absolutely, right. Have a look at them. First of all, realize that they are incredible flying aerial predators. Wassa are amazing. I mean, it's one of the reasons why they're quite hard to swat, of course. They're very, very good in the air. They're social. They are family-oriented, right?

There's a whole nest full of sisters. They're all looking after each other. Yeah, it's a very interesting social system. They've got this incredible nest back there. All they really want to do is go out and eat some natural prey, some caterpillars or whatever. But, you know, we've changed and modified the environment to such an extent that that's quite hard for them to do.

And then we have the temerity to sit outside on a warm day when they're most active, eating exactly the sort of carrion effectively that they like. And then we sit and complain about them. So yeah, absolutely. We need to appreciate them all. But there's a few simple things that we can do to help. I would suggest the first thing to do is if you are eating outside and wasps are incoming, you need to accept the fact that problem is occurred.

War is upon you, right? They are already there. They found you and you're probably best to try and relocate if you can. you know, or go inside for a little bit. I know it's a bit of a nuisance, but they will lose interest and go somewhere else. If you sit and try and tough it out with your discarded bits of burgers and hot dog on the side and soft drinks that, you know, not so soft drinks sometimes that people have left half discarded and cans and so on, which we all do, then you are providing an absolute buffet for them and they will keep coming. So it is one of those things where once it's happened,

you probably are best to try and clear everything away a little bit. Try and keep food covered up if it's outside. I'm fully aware of the fact that this is much easier said than done. I was at someone's house on Saturday. They have a rather active was nest. It's late May at the moment. That was nest is very active. I said to them already, I think, I think you're going to have a problem in a month or so's time because one of the nest is that active now by late junior. They're going to be all over it. And we were all sat there and I was saying, look, you know, let's try and cover it. It's never happening, right? We're all having a few drinks and whatever. But that is the best advice. Try not to I encourage them in the first place.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Adam Hart. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus?

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