Ologies with Alie Ward - Spheksology (WASPS) with Eric Eaton

Episode Date: June 22, 2021

Wasps!? Don’t even THINK of skipping this one, my beautiful chickens. You’re about to change your outlook on the most maligned winged sky babies, and we are delighted that author, bug dude, and spheksologist Eric Eaton is about to change your mind and fill your heart with respect and appreciation. Hunker down for fig critters, bejeweled zombie queens, bug corsets, underdogs, BBQ tips, gardening secrets, stinger myths and snack vaults. Just because homicidal hornets make headlines doesn’t mean you know squat about the real life of the beautifully diverse world of wasps, from the teeny tiny to the large and legendary. Wasps: they’re not dicks.Buy Eric's book wherever books are soldCheck out Eric’s websiteFollow Eric on TwitterA donation went to Xerces.orgMore episode sources and linksSponsors of OlogiesTranscripts & bleeped episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, totes and now… MASKS. Hi. Yes. Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media & Steven Ray MorrisTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryNeed a website built? Kelly Dwyer has you covered!Theme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the coconut liqroy that tastes just like sunscreen and you wouldn't have it any other way. Alli Ward, back with an episode of oligies. I'm so proud of you that you're listening to. You're doing it. Maybe you thought, no way in hell, Ward. Okay, fine. Or perhaps maybe you're listening with your arms crossed over your chest saying, make me like wasps.

I dare you, you can't do it. Watch me, wasp me. Watch me do it. First off, okay, how many species of wasp can you name? I know you're like yellow jagged hornets. The big mean hornets, the paper wasp. Maybe you've said the mud dauber. That's what, five right there?

Oh, I'm sorry. There's tens of thousands of described wasp species. So many uncategorized, undiscovered ones. They are like the tiny sharks of the air. They're feared apex predators who get a bad rap and most of them will not harm you. So hating on wasps, so yesterday, so gauche. So we're going to dig in. This oligist is a natural history writer.

The principal author on the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America. He has been a professional entomologist at the Oregon Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Smithsonian Institution. I have wanted to talk wasps for years with him, but we wanted to wait until his new book dropped and it's called Wasps, The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Instinct. And it did just drop. It just came out in March, so we will chat.

But first, we will thank patrons at patreon.com. It will cost you a cool dollar a month to join and submit your questions. And thanks to everyone leaving reviews, which keep the show kicking ass in the charts. We're going to read a freshie, which we do every week. This one is from Floodball, who left the Apple review. I'm a medical student in need of worldly wisdom, and this podcast has absolutely changed my life. No other words.

I love you. Floodball, I love you back. You're about to love wasps. Hunker down. So this totally unpronounceable ology is derived from the Greek word for wasp. Although so many people online just use the term waspology, we're going to discuss. We'll also cover homicidal hornets, the most painful stings,

bug corsets, modified egg cannons, breathtaking biodiversity, some gardening tips, why a wasp wants your sandwich, some barbecue strategies, underdogs, zombie victims, and snack faults, as we do our best to make you horny for hornets. It's going to happen with author, entomologist, and champion of your soon to be former enemies, the sexologist Eric Eaton. First thing I'll have you do is if you can say your first and last name and your pronouns.

Sure. Eric, with a C, Eaton, and he and him. Sweet. Okay. Now we discussed what the ology for this would be, and it was a speck of milk, an ecologist. How do you say it? There's different pronunciations.

There's spexology and spexology, and I'm not sure which one is preferred if either. I definitely think if there's a phobia attributed to it, there should be an ology, right? That's absolutely right, I agree. And perhaps even aphelia for people who are drawn to study them, right? Oh, I would agree with that as well. Could you tell me a little bit about how long you have been into bugs?

Oh, okay. I usually go with my mom's account, which is that I became interested in all things nature in kindergarten, and I vividly remember my teacher was a gifted artist, and she drew a trapdoor spider on the chalkboard one day, and I was just mesmerized by that, and then she told us how it behaved, and I was even more fascinated.

And so my affinity for nature has always been the underdog or the things that most people disdain. It was like sharks before they were cool, and snakes and spiders and insects and things of that nature. And if I'm truthful that I got interested in wasps initially because no one could call me a sissy for catching something that could fight back, but then when I learned about how they behave

and their natural history, my interest just took off all the more. Were you ever interested in bees first, or did you go straight from spiders and underdogs to wasps? That's a good question. I think I've always kind of had an affinity for flying, stinging things probably, and by today's measure,

bees are just a subset of wasps anyway. They've gone from the predatory lifestyle or parasitoid lifestyle to the pollen-collecting lifestyle. Pardon me, hold up. Bees are a subset of wasps? Tell me everything. Well, that's kind of an ongoing debate, but the trend is towards the idea that,

yeah, bees are essentially pollen-collecting wasps, and there are other wasps, by the way, that are what you would call true wasps that also collect pollen. Just a quick taxonomy aside. So my friend, Wikipedia, told me that a wasp is any insect of the narrow-wasted suborder apocrata that is not a bee nor an ant, but wasps do share a common ancestor with bees and ants.

So wasps come in a whole big variety of genera from Vespa, Hornets, and Vespula, aka Yellowjackets, but again, there's giant biodiversity, including, wait, wasps who collect pollen? What are those called? They're called pollen wasps, not surprisingly. And they're solitary, though.

They're not social. Part of the thing about wasps is that our public definition of wasps is very narrow. It's basically what we call a hornet or a Yellowjacket or a paper wasp. One of the social species of wasps, when in reality, the overwhelming majority of wasps lead solitary lives,

and only a fraction of them are capable of stinging us. Really? Yeah. The first thing you think about when you think of a wasp's nest is you think about a ton of them who want to hurt you. And so you're saying both of those things are flimflam? Well, it depends on the circumstance. If you aggravate a nest of social wasps,

you're going to be in for it. I mean, their venom and their sting is used primarily in defense of their nest because their nests contain very soft and helpless grubs and eggs and pupa that can't defend themselves. And so the workers are unleashed at the slightest hint of hostility. So again, not all wasps are social, and only a fraction of them sting, y'all.

So when you think about a hornet's nest or a Yellowjacket's nest, those are only one type of wasp, the social ones. And what would you do if a bear pounded on your window and poked its snoot in your door, hungry for your babies? Maybe you would brandish the venom gun attached to your butt to defend your several thousand newborns. They have so many babies. What about when you describe the body of a wasp?

What makes up a wasp? Is it the type of wings or mouth parts? There are four winged insects, and their wings are connected by these Hamuli, which are little hooks on the hind wing that join to the edge of the hind edge of the front wing so that they act as one pair. Wow.

And they don't, yeah, they don't flap independent of each other. But the sting, by the way, is really a weaponized egg-laying organ. I love that. Yeah, in the evolution of wasps, the females went from just this egg-injecting device, basically, to a venom-injecting device, and they then put their egg out through an oviduct rather than through what is now their stinger.

I mean, okay, let's ask the question, probably, on everyone's mind. How many times have you been stung, and how do you feel about it? Not very many. Oh, good for you. And those times I have been, it's been my fault, disturbed a nest by getting too close,

or netted the thing, and it's, you know, found a way to jab me. But most of the time I'm gentle with them, and they're gentle with me. Right now we have a paper wasp nest with one wasp on it in the corner of our back door. And, you know, we come and go out of there with no problem. I mean, it took us, you know,

a couple of weeks to recognize it was even there. So, you know, the idea that wasps are super aggressive probably is misinformation and exaggeration, and, you know, the media does a good job of that. And if you're in the business of pest control, you know, it's to your advantage to paint them as very aggressive animals. Maybe just because they're not fuzzy,

people don't trust them as much. And are they not fuzzy because for the most part they're not collecting pollen and nectar? Well, they are hairy, actually. Some are really hairy, like velvet ants, which are actually the females of velvet ants or wingless. And so they look like big furry ants

running around on the ground. So velvet ants are wasps, even though they are not ants, nor are they made of velvet. And they're called cow killers, even though they cannot kill cows. So the situation is indeed a little hairy. Most other wasps have hairs that are called cte,

and cte usually have some kind of sensory function. And so they're either detecting scents or air currents. Their vision isn't necessarily really good. They're good at detecting motion. In lieu of that, their cte can detect air currents. Oh, can imagine if... I mean, I guess if you have a lot of back hair, you probably could tell which direction the breeze is coming from.

I suppose we use it similarly, right? Yeah, maybe. I've got a ponytail right now because of COVID. Sure, you're not the only one out there, for sure. Yeah. You know, I'm so excited to hear about, like, work out in the field, did you have to do in collecting the stories and data for your book?

I mean, I did study entomology as an undergraduate at Oregon State. Eric's mentor was the late Dr. George Ferguson, who was a world authority on wasps and donated his collection of 80,000 specimens to Oregon State University. Oregon State, what's up? Hi.

Hi to your dead wasps. Anyway, Eric got to learn about their behavior from doing field research. Some things are just stunning. I was in Massachusetts, and I watched this mason wasp, which is a solitary relative of yellow jackets, and she was going over the surface of this curled-up leaf,

and I knew that there was a caterpillar in there, and I knew that mason wasps hunt caterpillars, but she didn't go after it the way I thought she would, which is to just bite a hole in the leaf and drag the thing out. She forced it to eject, and when these caterpillars eject, they basically bungee jump out of the thing. They release a thread of silk that they hang off of,

but they just leap out of their little curled leaf, and so what she does is she forces the thing to eject and then grabs it in mid-air before it can reach the ground. Oh, nice catch. Yeah. Yeah, that's some NFL stuff right there. Nice work. You said she are a lot of the wasps that we see are familiar with.

Are those females? Oh, excellent question. Well, let me put it this way. When people ask, you know, why are wasps such bastards? Well, in actuality, it's only the females that sting, so they're bitches, bitches. We got that question so much of like,

why are they such dicks, but they're not. Right. They're the seaword, thank you very much. See you next Tuesday then. I mean. Yeah, but again, it's only the, you know, our definition of wasps tends to be these social species that we tend to have negative interactions with,

and all the workers of social wasps are female, and males are only produced at the end of the colony life cycle, and they're released to mate with queens or females from other colonies at the end of the cycle. But that said, we see a lot of male wasps also. The males are either lounging around on flowers, eating nectar and stuff, because their only job is to find a female, right?

But the females have to do all this other stuff. They have to build a nest, which is often a burrow in the ground, or existing cavity in a log or something of that nature. And then she has to go hunt food to store for her offspring, or for those that don't make nest, they just have to find a host and lay an egg on or in it, or in the case of gall wasps,

they have to find the right host plant, and so they got a lot of work to do, the females. And for that, we should admire them. I mean, wasps are kind of a symbol of female empowerment as far as I'm concerned. But the males are, yeah, they're just either lounging around or they're defending a harem of females.

And so often the males are the aggressors, even though they can't sting. They're trying to chase off any intruders that might harm their group of females. So social wasps are a minority of wasp species, but are simply more visible because they hang out in crowds. And maybe you've seen their nests dingle dangling from somewhere.

Now, the majority of wasps are solitary. They're chill and solo. Maybe they're pollinating. Maybe they're laying their egg babies on alive spiders or cockroaches and just tucking them in to devour their victim alive and then getting out of dodge. Oh, and word alert.

So a parasitic organism kills its host, but a parasitoid lets its babies kill you. Can you imagine getting eaten alive by a baby? How pissed would you be? So embarrassing. But back to the social ones who hang out in cliques. How are these things? They have a tiny knot of neuronal ganglia doing it.

How are they doing it? I can't even organize a group text. Do they communicate with each other, like with social dances, like bees do or no? No. For the social wasps, their main form of communication is something called trophallaxis, which is mutual feeding.

And so you'll see if you watch a paper wasp nest, which I recommend doing, you know, maybe use binoculars. But you'll see two wasps appearing to kiss. And what they're doing is they're one is giving food to its nest mate. Oh, wow. And they also do that with the young. The larvae are fed protein matter,

and then they in turn regurgitate kind of a sweet secretion that feeds the adults. Okay. So you feed your baby and your baby's like, mm, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Thanks. And then burps up lunch for you and you're like, thank you.

Thank you, my baby. Yum, yum, yum, yum. That is happening all over the globe right now. And you never knew before. So many mysteries in the world of wasps. Some big, some teeny, teeny, like a tenth of a millimeter long. One thing I think that's so interesting about wasps, I didn't know until I visited the University of California

at Riverside, their entomology department there, that wasps are not what we always think of with yellow jackets and mud daubers and stuff like, there are these tiny little, are they called fairy flies? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about the range

of these little fairy flies all the way up to so-called murder hornets? Yeah. Fairy flies. I can tell you're already bristling at the murder hornet. That was unfortunate. Okay. First of all, let's lay out the lifestyle of most wasps.

And that's a parasitoid lifestyle. And a parasitoid is basically a parasite that invariably kills the host. And in the case of fairy flies and several other families of tiny wasps, by the way, they're parasitoids of the eggs of other insects. And you can get several tiny egg parasitoids out of one egg of the host.

It's crazy. So imagine an insect's egg and into it, a wasp has jammed dozens of her own babies into your baby and her babies eat your baby from the inside out. Mimi, don't imagine this. But the point is parasitoid wasps, especially these teeny tiny black shiny fairy flies, they get a lot of bang out of their buck for eggs.

And they're sometimes used as bio warfare against agricultural pests. And some fairy flies are nearly microscopic. There's one that barely exceeds the size of a paramecium, I think. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it does its entire stuff with, you know,

only a few hundred neurons or something. I mean, it's just ridiculous how complex such a tiny thing can be. And they get bigger and bigger then until, I mean, obviously we probably assume that some of the wasps we see out and about are gnats, right? Probably. Yeah. And that's exactly to see these things because you have to set up

flight intercept traps and malaise traps, and then you can put them under a microscope to see them. Yeah. Yeah. Malaise trap side note are the white tents that are covering a jar and entomologists set them out in fields or yards to collect a sampling of local bugs. And all those little things that might just look like dust motes

in the wind, they may be unidentified species. There are so many little bugs that we haven't formally met yet. I lived in an apartment and in the summer I'd get little gnats sometimes all over my bathroom mirror. And it wasn't until I found a dead one, looked at it and sent a picture to Lila Higgins from the entomology episode. And she was like, oh, that's a wasp. There used to be a fig tree right under my window.

And so there were probably fig wasps, which so many of us have heard that if you eat a fig, Newton, you're eating so many dead wasps. Is this true or false? Oh, gosh. Even if it is, they're so infinitesimally small. Right. It's like, that's fine. But they do, they do burrow into figs and live inside a fig, right?

This is correct. And one thing people may not know is that the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration, the two entities that control our food quality, have allowances for numbers of insect parts because it's just impossible to exclude them. I mean, that's how ubiquitous insects are. And so even if you're not eating a fig, you're probably eating another insect somewhere during your day.

I had lettuce on my sandwich. I probably had an aphid. I don't know. The only pollinators of figs are these tiny wasps that have developed this mutualistic relationship with figs. And it's ridiculously complex. There's a great many species. Some figs do not require pollination, by the way.

But for those that do, there's not only the fig wasp, but there's other wasps that are parasitoids of the fig wasp. And probably parasitoids of the parasitoids wouldn't surprise me either. I mean, a lot of this hasn't been completely figured out yet. Unless an insect is of economic importance in one way or another, there's not a lot of funds to study them. And so a lot of what we know, we owe to really curious and determined scientists that said, I'm going to find funding to do this because it interests me.

There's a shortage of that kind of money to do these kinds of things, but we desperately need that. Okay, but one thing they have figured out is some hot-ass goss about how figs are made. A tradition that goes back evolutionarily about 80 million years. Are you ready for this? Okay, so a fig is an inside-out flower. Let's start by just trying to cope with that fact right there.

And then a lady wasp digs into it via the bottom of the fig's little butthole. And in so doing, she rips her wings and antenna off and then uses blades on her face to worm through the fig, pollinating the fig's internal blossom, and then she dies. She dies in there. She's like, okay, cool, I'm done here. And then her baby's hatch, and the males of them have no wings. They just, they don't need them.

They don't need them. They mature. They impregnate a female wasp before she hatches. A fig wasp born knocked up. Can you imagine? You're born pregnant from some wingless creep who is also your soulmate. And he's like, I got a split, bitch. And he digs a tunnel out.

But once he's out, he's like, fuck, I just remembered I don't have wings. And you're like, thanks, dude, I got a motor. You go out his tunnel. You take some of the pollen with you all over your pregnant newborn body into the butthole of another fig, which once again is an inverted flower. Now, before you dramatically wretch at the thought of a fig, apparently the figs were like, this is a convenient system for us. It's probably bad PR, though.

So figs make an enzyme called fiken that digests the dead wasps. So vegans, you're pretty much in the clear. Don't worry about it. There's so many alive things all over everything we eat. Even when we try our plant-based best, everything's crawling with something else. Oh, and the crunchy things in a fig, you're never going to believe what they are. You ready for this? They're seeds.

They're just seeds. Just calm down. Enjoy the fig. You know, when it comes to getting, say, bigger and bolder, what is kind of next up the line if we're going from these fairy wasps to fig wasps? And then what are some of the ones that we commonly see? Oh, OK. Well, if we upgrade to the size where your naked eye is going to spot the thing,

mud daubers are a really good example of a solitary wasp that we see frequently. And if we don't see the wasps, we certainly see their nests, which look like somebody just threw a clot of mud up under your eave or whatever, right? And so that's, most of those are the creation of one female wasp. And so she, you know, builds one cell of mud after another. And in each, she, she stores spiders that she gathers, paralyzes and sticks in there and then seals the mud cell. And the larva that hatches from the egg that she laid in there,

then consumes that stash of still living paralyzed spiders. Oh, my God. That is so hardcore. I didn't realize that mud daubers were making pantries full of dead spiders. Yeah. Wait, is that right? Mud splats are acting as pantries full of dead spiders? Or is it juicier than that?

Do the larvae parasitize it while it's living or is it dead in there? No, they're, they're, they're living. You know, they don't have cold storage and most of these insects are, you know, they're susceptible to the same moles and fun giant things that, you know, are bred in the fridges and stuff. So they're paralyzed so they stay fresh, basically. Entomologists will tell you insects do not have pain receptors. So it's not, they're not feeling nothing.

That doesn't make it any less gruesome, I don't think. Right. Are the eggs inside the body of the spider or how? No, they're just, they're just feeding exteriorly. When they're done, there might be a few legs left or something. Oh, wow. And then, okay. So mud daubers, we might see clods of mud inside.

No big deal. It's a tomb for a living zombie, like mummy. Okay. No biggie. What other ones do you think that people commonly see? I don't know the difference necessarily between a wasp and a hornet and a yellow jacket. So what's the difference with those guys? Well, okay.

If you want to talk about social species again, then yellow jackets are primarily what we would call boreal insects. That is that they're northern in their distribution. Some of them now are holarctic. They either exist on all the continents or they've been introduced from one to the other. So that's the northern hemisphere basically. The further south you go, yellow jackets start to peter out a bit. And then they're replaced by paper wasps, which are the ones that look a little more

slender and they build paper combs that have no covering on them. And so those you often see under the eaves along with a mud dauber nest. Okay. So those are the ones that you can see the comb. They look almost like those plants that people get really afraid of. Right. You know those plants that have holes and people are like, that's my trochanocophobia. Right.

Have you heard of that? Okay. So this is called trypophobia. And I just found out that two scientists, Arnold Wilkins and Jeff Cole, are studying the visual stress related to it. So they may be the world's leading trypologists. They found out a 2015 paper titled assessment of trypophobia and analysis of its visual precipitation.

They found that 17 to 18% of the population has a fear of clusters of holes around objects. So it's pretty normal. And that images in the natural world just don't have that characteristic unless they are dangerous animals or potentially contagious skin diseases. So it's inbuilt in us. Or maybe you're afraid of the triple lenses on iPhone 11 pro cameras. Those cost $1,000. Also very scary.

On the flip side, if you're all about gazing at bubbling pancakes or lotus blossom pods, you may enjoy the subreddit trypophobia, which is really a trypophiliax paradise. So many pictures. Or you know what? You could just stare up at the open comb of a paper wasp's nest. Okay. So those are paper wasps. And then what about the ones that make what looks like a papery beehive?

Yeah, that's those, those are aerial yellow jackets. And even though, even though we call one of them the bald faced Hornet, it's still a yellow jacket is just a larger one. And it's black and white instead of black and yellow. Oh, why do they evolve to be striped in black and yellow so much? Are these dark colors? That's something called aposemitism. I think I'm pronouncing that correctly or more colloquially, they're called warning colors.

So their enemies learn to associate those bold color patterns with the fact that they can sting. Got it. Okay. Makes sense. It's like a caution tape, essentially. It's like, don't mess with my butt. I will hurt you. Which makes sense.

If my butt could hurt people, I don't want to let them know. Don't touch my butt. I might hurt you with it. If they sting you, the ones that can sting, will they die? Do their organs get ripped out like a bee or no? There are some tropical social wasps, I believe, and some yellow jackets that have barbed stingers. And so, yes, sometimes they lodge in you. That's not something that happens every time.

Whereas with honeybees, it pretty much is. Once they plant that stinger, that's the end of the deal. But, yes, occasionally, for some yellow jackets and other social wasps, they do have that kind of evisceration that comes with stinging. Oof. Now, okay, I feel like when we hear hornet's nest, we think angrier and angrier. I almost feel like if you had to go do a family feud style, I'm going to poll 100 people. We could put on a list like bumblebees are the nicest, and then honeybees, and then wasps, and then yellow jackets, and then hornets, and then murder hornets. We would give this a range.

I feel like that's probably not accurate. But do they get bigger and bigger as we go? Do they get angrier and angrier the bigger they get, or is that just total myth again? We have only one species of hornet in the US that's established, and that's the European hornet, which, as the name suggests, was introduced from Europe. They're basically Eurasian, all the hornets. The different species exist over on the other side of the pond, so to speak, and I don't know. I mean, I have come across a nest of European hornets once. It was in a hollow tree.

I got up in their grill. There was a little small entrance to the nest. I got pretty close, and they showed no aggression to me whatsoever. If you linger in the flight path of hornets or yellow jackets coming and going from the nest, eventually they're going to be annoyed at you, I think, and they'll at least give you a loop-to-loop warning that maybe you ought to move your butt there. But basically, I mean, yeah, I walked right up to a ball-faced hornet nest and watched them put paper on the nest and stuff, and I don't stay there too long. But unless you shake vigorously, I think you're okay. Now, what about, I'm sorry, I got to ask you about murder hornets. And I know you heaved a heavy sigh, like just a heavy-hearted exasperation in all insect experts these days.

Murder hornets, obviously, got their name kind of colloquially, but what are they, how aggressive are they, how many are there, what's the deal? Well, I want to preface this by saying once again, it's a human problem less than it is a wasp problem. We seem to have decided that our global commerce, that one of the acceptable risks of that is introducing species that don't belong here. Honey murder hornet, not because they can murder people. I mean, that in some extreme incident, I suppose that is possible. But what they do do is they raid honeybee hives and they can take out an entire hive of honeybees because they're three times the size of the honeybee. I mean, they're enormous. They're twice the size of a yellow jacket at least.

They fly in, crush the heads of the guard bees, go into the nest, keep crushing workers, and then they go and pilfer the larvae and the honey to take back to their own nest. I mean, I'm only crushing your heads. And so that's how they got the name murder hornet. It's for the murder of honeybee hives, not the murder of people. So that's the first thing. And secondly, it was a really irresponsible term for anybody to create. It's typical clickbait kind of thing now, right? It's typical media behavior.

And do they pose a big threat to apaculture here in the continental US? Potentially. One of the problems that was created by this is that in the monitoring for this species, it's Vespa mandarinia, by the way, is the scientific name of this hornet. In the course of monitoring, they're monitoring in places. This thing is never going to show up. It's never going to live in Texas. It's too hot. It's never going to live in the Southeast.

And especially in the Pacific Northwest, where you've got so many ports where they can enter, you know, yeah, you should be monitoring for these things. And yes, there is a risk they could become established. If we don't start inspecting cargo better, if we don't think about maybe assessing some kind of tax for invasive species and this kind of thing so that we can deal with it if it does happen. So these are, again, human problems. Wasps are going to do wasp things and, you know, no matter where they are, right? And while many folks think that they're darling, precious North American honeybees need saving, they're invasive, but they have an incredible publicity team. The problem is mostly with feral colonies of honeybees that establish in the wild and then start out competing native bee species. Shoot, apaculture has its own lobby.

It's going to get a lot of money from the government, a lot of subsidies. And you have migratory beekeeping now where beekeepers truck their hives across the country, depending on what crops need pollinating like almonds in California there. Your bees to pollinate those might have come from Michigan. Okay, story time. So one February, I was stuck in a three hour traffic jam on the grapevine next to a Mack truck carrying hundreds of box hives. And I get excited because bugs and I roll down the window and I could hear and feel a really faint thrum in the air from just millions of bees. And I thought, oh, man, it's winter. Let those ladies rest.

Also, the bees are so lucky they could pee anywhere they want, which on the grapevine I couldn't. It was too inconvenient for me. Ooh. And what do wasps do ecologically? Tell us some of the wonderful things wasps are responsible for. Oh, they're pollinators as well. They're what you would call technically flower visitors because they're there for with the exception of the pollen wasps that I mentioned earlier, which are collecting pollen that they'll store for their larval offspring. Wasps are there for nectar because the adult wasps need carbohydrates like like we do to fuel, you know, to give them energy.

Whereas the larval insect when it's growing up needs protein to grow on and go through metamorphosis. And so in the course of visiting flowers, wasps are going to pollinate flowers. And by the way, some orchids depend on wasps for pollination to the extent that they mimic the female wasp and get the male to fornicate with them. I swear to God, I'm not making this up. And so, yeah, in Europe and I think Australia and maybe South Africa, there's wasps that are intimately, literally intimately tied to orchids. How romantic. Can you imagine? There's like a hot dog stand in the shape of a, your nude lover just waiting for you.

I mean, amazing. And then, oh, I have so many questions from listeners. Can I do a lightning round? We'll get through as many as we can. Sure. Oh, the other thing is, is we don't need to a charity of your choice. Any, any related charities? You don't have to tell me now.

You can email it to me later if you feel like it. Well, I would give a shout out to the Xerces Society. That's X, E, R, C, X, E, R, C. I know them very well. Yes. Xerces, of course. Yes. I will shout them out and we'll give them a donation.

They're awesome. I've uploaded their guides on what to plant in my backyard for native pollinators. Yeah, I love them. Okay, good. Oh, sweet. So yeah, a donation went to the Xerces Society and that was made possible by sponsors of the pod who you may hear about now. Okay.

You're a wasp like diverse, wondrous and pointed questions. Okay. Lightning round. A lot of questions. The most frequent question I got is, why are they so Dix? We covered it. We're good. So Leanne Dixon asks, what's the deal with wasps recognizing faces?

Can they really do this? And if so, what facial features can they recognize or differentiate? I wonder if wearing a mask these days helps at all or not? Wasps can, well, it's been demonstrated that paper wasps can recognize colony members from their facial patterns. Well, they can't recognize humans as far as I know. Okay. The benefit of that is that it is part of the social order.

Paper wasps don't have a queen in the sense of a physically different female than like, you know, yellow jackets and hornets have a physically larger female that does nothing but produce eggs, but paper wasps are a little bit lower on the evolutionary scale. And so all the females are capable of producing eggs if they're not bullied by the dominant female. And so they learn to recognize each other and act accordingly. So a wasp nest can produce like 4,000 new queens. And in the fall, when the temperatures dip and all the workers die off, the queens are

like Sia. They go find an abandoned animal burrow or a hollow tree or like a junkyard car. And they survive the winter because they have an antifreeze compound in their blood. So then they build their own nest when it warms up. They make a bunch of new workers and the cycle starts again in the spring. Of course, that's the social wasps. Some queens, they duke it out, sounds like a very brutal version of some of our high school experiences.

Now, speaking of painful external pressures, patron Rich Flight asked, what's the deal with the skinny waist? What's their diet plan? And this question was also on the ganglia of Megan Walker and first time question askers Lily Taggart and Tegan Mortimer and a few other folks want to know, what is the point of the wasp waist, the insect one, not the 19th century fashion one? And how do the lower bits of their body not just fall off? This is really bizarre.

I had forgotten this until I was researching the book, but the abdomen of the wasp actually starts on the rear end of the thorax. It's called the propodium. And so that's the first dorsal segment of the abdomen. And so everything posterior to that is called the gaster. So in general, that teeny, tiny tube waist of some hymenoptera like ants and wasps is called a petiol. And their shapely rump area is the gaster, which you're welcome to call yours from now

on. Now, I was looking at pictures of paper wasps nests and how they hang from a cord like a chandelier filled with wasps. And it turns out that that stock at the top also called a petiol. Okay. Well, why? And not all wasps have that thin waist like the soft lies and horn tails, which are more primitive wasps.

If you want to frame it that way, still have a cigar shaped joint to the thorax, a broader joint to the thorax. But when you have that hinged abdomen, it gives you great flexibility when you're trying to stings your host. So it's like a goose neck lamp. Yeah. Oh, that's a good. Oh, that's an excellent analogy.

Yeah. Why, thank you. I hope never to encounter one up close, but I commend it. That makes sense. So do they have their guts? Is there like one little intestine that goes from the top to the bottom? Yeah, there's an esophagus and then the basically the alimentary canal runs through the thorax. The thorax is almost all muscle, by the way.

It's what operates the wings and the legs. And so it's a really dense muscle structure. And then the abdomen houses the stomach and the reproductive and excretory organs. That is amazing. I've always wondered what's in there because it's such a little pipe cleaner tube. Also, did you ever wonder why a Vespa scooter is called a Vespa? I did. So I decided to Google it for several hours.

So upon seeing a redesign of the little motorbike, which has a front part with two handlebars and a thin floorboard and then a juicy bedunk that houses the motor, one of the engineers said in Italian, that freaking thing looks like a wasp. Are you kidding me? I love it. And so Vespa means wasp in Italiano. And they've been buzzing around the world ever since then. And I thought, goddamn, that must be where the cocktail Vespa gets its name.

But no, the vodka and gin martini with Lillé is called a Vespa, but it comes from the word for evening, not because a giant freezing cold chalice of straight grain alcohol packs a bit of a sting. I'm going to go to first-time question asker, Xero Piochochi, wants to know, how is it that wasps and bees are so similar, looks so similar, but wasps have evolved to consume meat while bees are content just to rub their butts in flour dust. Why do some wasps eat meat? I know when I used to be a caterer, when there were yellow jackets, they'd be like, just throw

a piece of ham over there to divert them. What's up with that? Well, you know, again, you know, the adult wasps are not consuming protein matter. They're taking it back for their offspring. Amazing. And so, yeah, so though I've watched a yellow jacket cut a piece out of my turkey sandwich and fly off with it. It's like, you know, the one, by the way, one thing I want to caution all your listeners

about is serving beverages outdoors. Do not serve them in cans or opaque bottles or glassware. You can get a yellow jacket crawling in there. And if you get stung on your tongue, you know, even if you're not allergic, that can be a life-threatening experience, you know, serve your beverages in clear glasses. So about a million people go to the ER every year for insect stings. But most are just fine, but about 60 to 70 people die every year from allergic reactions to stinging bugs.

So just look for symptoms like tingling sensations, dizziness, hives, the skin kind, swelling of your lips or tongue, maybe having a hard time breathing or wheezing, or if someone just straight up passes out, no matter why you should probably go to the ER for that last one anyway. But one of Eric's pals, he says, you may have heard of him. Justin Schmidt, the king of sting he's called who created the Schmidt Pain Index of Insect Stings. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. He occasionally will self-inflict a sting upon himself and then describe it and rate it on a scale of one to four for being the worst thing and one, you know, being the barely detectable, basically, honeybee is a number two on his scale, by the way. But he found out that tarantula hawks, which they need their venom to paralyze their tarantula prey. I mean, you got to have a pretty wicked sting, I would think, to paralyze a tarantula anyway.

But it turns out that it's absolutely excruciatingly painful if you get stung by one of those things, but in about three minutes, you're fine and it doesn't do any damage. It's totally tailored to the prey item thereafter. And that's for solitary wasps, that's the deal. They're telling their venom to a specific host. They're not worried about self-defense. So for solitary wasps, their venom is really prey specific. Now, what about the city wasps?

The ones who live in big paper buildings on the side of your house or underground with thousands of other ones and they just love the hustle-bustle of the nest life. But for social wasps, that's another story. I mean, there, that is the purpose of their sting is, you know, get the hell away from our nest. We got babies in there, get out, and they will, you know, they can route a bear out of their nest. So what's the highest on the Schmidt index you've ever been stung?

Oh, wow. Somewhere around a three, probably a paper wasp got me once and that was pretty painful. Yeah. The pharmacologist, Terry McGlynn, talked to me about his bullet ant bite, did not feel good, a sting. Oof. Will Eric ever be sticking his face into a nest for YouTube clout? My feeling about myself is that if it ever becomes about me, I need to find another line

of work because I want it to be about the message. And my message is that, you know, these things deserve, you know, an appreciation and respect that we're not giving them right now. Right. Well, Minster wants to know what's up with wasp, venom, and cancer treatments. Have you heard anything about their venom being heroically used? There's certainly research going on. There's some kind of Brazilian wasp, I think, that shows promise in that regard that it

targets specifically some protein or something that's specific to cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone. The one 2017 Brazilian study titled Phosphatidylserine lipids and membrane order precisely regulate the activity of Polybia MP1 peptide, sure, found that a toxin and a species of South American wasp targets cancer cells while sparing healthy cells. So the wasp venom contains a toxin called MP1, which globs on to fat molecules on the surface of cancer cells, making the tumor cells leak out what they need. But in healthy cells, a lot of the business is on the inside of the cell, so the MP1 doesn't

affect it. But hey, don't go getting stung as medicine. We are not there yet. Also don't grind up oak galls and shove them up your cooter. Some folks do take tree galls, which are created by flies or mites or yes wasps, and they pulverize them to mark it as a tunnel tightener, if you will. Not a good idea, not medically sound, also sounds a bit grainy, to be honest. This is an excellent point.

We're not funding basic research the way we used to, and so there's not a lot of money to go into this kind of thing, and we haven't even scratched the surface of all these insect-based chemicals that are unique to insects that could have really impactful implications in medicine and other technology for that matter. Pulse and advance wasps, your millions of years of evolution, your stingy butts might be saving ours. Who knows? Daisy Goldstein Cross had a great question, wanted to know, do they ever use materials

besides wood pulp to make those hanging paper nests like plastic? It's so beautiful, and they've used it in some collages before. Do they do paper wasps ever use anything other than wood pulp? Basically any woody cellulose source is something they can use. Some of the social wasps also build mud nests rather than paper nests. Basically any cellulose source, woody cellulose source, this is something that they can use. It need not be from an old fence post or something, but you often see them gathering material from sources like that.

I never thought of how we use wood pulp for paper, and so do they. They just chew up wood, they mix it with spit. We could probably do that for stationery if we were so lazy. Now, a lot of you, looking at you patrons, Sarah Van Deventer, Ashley Conan, Lisa Burbage, Charlotte Felkegaard, Kelly Semmon, Megan Walker, and Yuri Yong have gardens and needed advice on how to coexist with wasps, as did. Kimberly Hoffman wants to know, how in the heck can I create a pollinator-friendly property, creating wasps without having them make nests on the house?

Is there some sort of box I could make for them to have a safe home and reduce negative human interactions with wasps? And actually, another great question to pair with that is, Katie Spino wants to know, do the fake wasps nests work to prevent them from making a nest near your house? Okay, the answer to that is no. Okay. Yeah, don't bother with paper bags and what have you. Don't bother painting the underside of your eaves sky blue either.

Basically our architecture mimics where they nest naturally, which is like on cliff faces and under rock ledges and things like that. And so your house is just a big cliff to them. And of course, they're going to nest there. And if they're in a place where you can't tolerate them, remember, I just said we had a nest in the corner of our door frame here that I didn't notice for two weeks, just let them do their thing, tell people, tell your guests that come over, okay, please be careful of that.

I'm I'm supporting biodiversity. I say that about our messy house, too, or not, or not messy housekeepers are promoting biodiversity. Exactly. But my wife is going to kill me when she hears me say that. So much biodiversity on dirty dishes. You're doing great, everyone. Wait, where were we?

Yes, outdoors. Oh, how can you create a pollinator friendly garden? Well, if you plant for bees, you're going to get wasps by default. Anyway, you know, if you have a vegetable garden, you're going to have a few aphids while they're going to attract little wasps that sting them and lay an egg in their little aphid and the aphid becomes the aphid mummy. And then the wasp eventually cuts its way out through a little hatch that looks exactly like a round door coming out of aphid or what used to be the aphid.

So yeah, just learn and celebrate these little things when you find them. If you put up bee hotels or bee condos, they're called sometimes wasps, solitary wasps will nest in those as well and welcome them because they're taking care of pest caterpillars in your garden and other critters that might be gnawing on your veggies. Also when it comes to bee hotels, do some research and make sure you're getting ones that have removable tubes so you can replace or clean them because things get dirty, mites get in there and you want your little pollinator babies to be healthy. So research cleaning your bird feeders too.

Did you know dirty ones can transmit birdie disease? Also I neglected to mention in the wildlife ecology episode that you should do some research on bears in your area too because they can be attracted to bird feeders and that is how bears get labeled as a nuisance and shot. And I just want to say thanks Ashley, theologist on Twitter. You can follow her at the angryologist for more wildlife tips. And yes, consider that some native wasps are just out there like bouncers in your garden, 86ing some little critters munching on your lettuce.

Oh, thanks wasps. Going around doing some cleanup for us. Also, Segwani Dana is up in Maine and says, I have seen a couple of the giant iknymyon iknymon wasps females, I believe she says, around my house and they are beautiful. Can you please talk a little bit about them and their life cycle? And yeah, these wasps, I've seen them before. I can't remember how to pronounce them, but but what's what their life cycle? Yeah, you know you had right is iknymyon wasps.

I see H and E U M O N. Certainly Google these mostly non-stinging critters who are like, you will know me by my butt wand. They're now being called Darwin wasps by some some of the experts on that group. You know, now they're thinking there might be as many as a million iknymon wasps species alone that we've only described a small fraction of those in the thousands. But anyway, these guys, yeah, they're the females, rather, their body is maybe a couple inches long, but their ovipositors, their egg-laying organs are streaming out the back end, adding

another four inches to the to the wasp. So when these things fly by, it looks like one of those skyriders or something, you know. And what they're using that long ovipositor to do is to drill into trees or, you know, dead or dying trees that are inhabited by another wasp called the horn tail wasp. And its grubs are bores in dead and dying trees. Somehow the iknymon is able to kind of like divine, you know, these like like those old water witches, you know, divine where this larva is inside this tree. And then she arches up her abdomen and flips that ovipositor underneath her and drills

down to reach that grub, lays an egg on it, and then leaves the scene. And her own larva will then feed on the horn tail larva. Wow. Yeah. Drama, so much drama. Also, Eric's book, Boss, The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Insect, is so pictorial and beautiful. And the cover features these two delicate orange and black wasps that are huddled on a

flower stock, seemingly having some kind of business meeting. Does he have one wasp that he just can't stop staring at? Does he have a secret favorite? Do you have a favorite wasp? Do I have a favorite one? Well, not anymore. Not after learning about these wasps that I was less familiar with. Yeah, I have to say that I have a true, honest appreciation of all of them now.

I do like the colorful ones. Of course, the cuckoo wasps and velvet ants and things like that that are either, you know, metallic in the case of cuckoo wasps or, you know, bright, fuzzy critters, but the wasp that is on the cover are called Amophila. And I'm going to be good friends with a world authority on these. And he just wrote a new scientific key to them, describing a couple of new species, in fact, and the ones on the cover are sleeping. Believe it or not, wasps sleep.

And in the case of these thread-waisted Amophilus, they grip some little twig or stem in their jaws and then prop their body at a 45 degree angle and spend the night that way. And sometimes they gather in loose clusters and they can look like a little cluster of, you know, seed pods or something. But yeah, if you go around a field at dusk or something and you and you look closely, you might find them settling down for the night. Oh, my gosh, gorgeous.

I mean, is there a good way to start going on a wasp safari if you want to let them into your heart? Well, that's a good question. Just go out of your house. Yeah, or go up into the attic. There might be a mud-dumber nesting up there for all we know. A lot of, by the way, a lot of things I see on social media are of postings of wasps that found their way indoors.

And often this is because they nested indoors and then the offspring are now emerging inside rather than outside. So, you know, people often just have, you know, are just astonished to find this weird mishmash of things in their window track or their wind chimes. Sometimes they nest in there too. Up in the wind chimes, gosh, I love the idea that just we're just kicking around, walking around with a cup of tea. No idea that there are semi-alive spiders that are mummified in the wall.

Like, so cool. Ethan Chapman asked, just how smart are they? I've heard they're much more intelligent than bees and other stingy boys. And Christina Weaver wants to know, I want to know how the parasitic wasp mind control works. How do they do it? Oh, wow. Lots of unpack there.

You OK, buddy? All right. Well, here's the thing. I think one of the reasons I think we kind of hold this latent envy of wasps that they're maddeningly efficient at exploiting our every weakness. And they do it without this burden of ethics and etiquette and moral compass that that we have to deal with. And so here they're ragingly successful with stimulus, response and instinct.

And here we are with these big brains and we can't remember where we parked the car. And yet a sand wasp female can find her nest in a dune. Yeah, all right. So, you know, yeah, they have a way of making us look stupid. But instinct, I think, is a lot more plastic than we used to think it is. And so it gives it has some malleability and wasps still have have to make choices in things. And sometimes those choices are are evolutionarily successful. And sometimes they're not just like any other organism.

So I think are they intelligent only as much as they have to be? And I think that applies to just about, you know, every animal, you know, there's no waste in nature. Everything is just the point it needs to be to survive when we throw in our very rapid changes to the landscape that makes it a little bit harder for them to succeed. Now, changing gears completely to the zombie wasp kind of thing. Well, our definition of venom is changing a lot. It used to be kind of a, well, is it a lethal thing?

Or is it is it a toxin? And if so, what kind of a toxin? Well, basically, a venom now is anything that changes the impacts the host in one fashion or another. And that in the case of most wasps, it's it's either partial, a temporary or complete paralysis of the host. But in the case of some of these wasps, especially broconids and ignomins, which are very closely related groups, they also have a virus

that is peculiar to them that the female injects when she lays her egg. And she may inject a mild or some kind of venom that also influences the host in some way or makes it easier for the virus to do its thing, which is to basically, yeah, mind control the the brain of the host to to bend its will to facilitate the wasps offspring. And so when the in the case of some caterpillars or in one case ladybug parasitoid, the host survives the parasitic experience and winds up hovering over the the pupa stage of the wasp and is responsive to stimuli

in a defensive fashion and is thus a kind of brain controlled guardian, robotic guardian of its own parasitoid. Wow. Yeah. Oh, I mean, what a beautiful thing, though. I mean, that is just evolution years and years and years and years. So just to think of how many iterations to get the right type of neurotoxin that would work like that, you know? Oh, there's there's wasps that have Rube Goldberg life cycles.

It's just insane where they where they don't even attack the host directly. They attack its host and won't complete their life cycle unless the intended host or intended parasitoid takes the host. No, it's unbelievable. If you need a new genre of horror or suspense to get into, may I suggest reading about parasitoid wasps for hours as I have just done past 2 a.m. So many species, so many stories, so many victims. It's bananas. OK, really quick.

There are these earthly beings called jewel wasps that are gorgeous and metallic and they can use their stingers to essentially do brain surgery on their cockroach hosts and they feel around with their stingers inside of its head and inject venom into very specific regions and their venom does things like simulate a flood of neurochemicals that makes the cockroach compulsively clean itself for about half an hour, making it a nice clean host for her baby. And then as the roach is primping, the wasp is off, finding a good burrow, comes back, breaks off a roach antenna and gets a nice long quench from its body

and then uses the remaining antenna to lead this newly unfettered zombie roach like a frickin farm donkey to a tomb, seals it up, lays an egg on its leg and then her baby feeds off of this alive, stung roach for days and days until it makes its debut in the world, busting out of the burrow like a curtain, like a shiny, metallic, bejeweled queen at the best Palm Springs drag show you have ever witnessed wasps. I mean, are you even able to even right now? I had to go around the room picking up the pieces of my brain every day after.

I love that you just got to be inundated with wasp facts like, oh, what a dream. I love that. Captain Morse asked, is it just random chance that I'm stung in the palm frequently by wasps on metal railings, grab bars and even metal wheelchair parts. It's always a wasp and not a bee. This is a disability challenge. No one mentions.

Do do they like shiny things? Oh, first of all, that's not something anybody should endure more than once at least. But well, they they'll purchase on different services to groom themselves a lot. So I often, you know, if I want to take pictures of wasps off and hang out around the edge of a field where there's shrubs and things with broad leaves. And so they'll they'll land on there and they'll groom themselves or they'll land on there to mate or the males will land to guard territory or something on that order.

And so, yeah, they'll land on surfaces you wouldn't expect just in the course of needing to groom or rest for a minute or something like that. But they're not going to be there that long if it's a hot surface. So the metal thing kind of surprises me a bit. I would expect them more on wood surfaces and and foliage and things of that nature. Interesting. I wonder if they're perched on it, being like, why is it every time I sit on metal? Someone squishes me with my hand.

Why is it keep it in me? I did some more digging on this and I couldn't find much. However, wasps do gravitate toward metallic car grills because they like to snack on bug guts. So maybe, Catherine, you ran over a bug or like a little bit of fresh sidewalk pizza cheese that was on your wheels that was just irresistible. I don't know very much a hypothesis, but I hope it doesn't happen again. Everyone, don't litter, even if it's pizza.

The repercussions can go on and on. Anyway, speaking of sucky stuff. OK, the questions I always have to ask again. I know that we are here to absolutely adore wasps and we do love them and they were beautiful, but what is one thing about studying them that sucks? They're so bloody fast. That's not a compliment. I love that.

Yeah, I mean, they just don't sit still for anything hardly. Yeah, I consider it a privilege when I get a chance to get up close to one for any period of time more than a nanosecond. I don't know. I mean, yeah, I guess, you know, the fact that that I'm in a minority of people that appreciate that may be the thing that sucks the most. I'm put on here to defend creatures that don't have a lot of and our entomology community has has failed you, to be honest. You know, we haven't done our due diligence in in pointing out the the positive

aspects of wasps and their diversity. There's insectaries where they raise itty bitty teeny wasps that they release into agricultural fields, for example. But nobody hears about that. We only hear about murder organs. Exactly. And just the fact that I have said on podcast episodes before that wasps or dicks is is a huge flag to me that I don't know enough about wasps.

You know what I mean? And I'm and I love this. You do your homework, though. And I mean, my hat is off to you. Your audience is already educated and eager to learn. And I wish that applied to more people. I want to thank your listeners, in fact, right now. Oh, yeah.

The wasp guy likes you. Isn't that the best? It's going to be a hard question to answer. But your favorite thing about wasps or your favorite wasp, I don't know. How do you even answer that? Their diversity is just astonishing. I mean, you know, that's that's in the the title of the book, a subtitle of the book, in fact, and more so even than I dreamed of.

I mean, I had an inkling. I'm learning new stuff every day. So it's hard to it's hard to pick a favorite. But I, you know, I certainly adore the shiny ones, the cuckoo wasps and the fuzzy wingless female velvet ants and their winged males and tarantula hawks and their metallic blue and orange and what have you. But yeah, they all have all have a place and you don't, you know, you don't have to like every organism as long as you understand that it has a place

and you can respect that and act accordingly. You know, there's there's plenty of organisms I don't like. But I but thankfully I understand their their role in the ecosystem and their impact on on humanity enough to, you know, to pay them some respect. I think we should start conversations with what's your favorite wasp? And if that's just how you know, yeah, that's going to be an icebreaker, you better find a favorite wasp. That's fine by me.

My favorite wasp is probably the tarantula hawk wasp. I mean, they're so beautiful. They have that brilliant like midnight blue body and this golden, almost like caramel colored wings. And whenever I see them in California, I freak out. I get so excited. I've been on like a hike before when I'm like pointed strangers toward it to be like, look, look at this beautiful thing.

It's so nice to see one. So I think that's my favorite. They're so beautiful. Well, congratulations on your book. Thank you. I mean, wasps, the astonishing diversity of a misunderstood insect. It says it all. I love it. So exciting. Thank you so, so much for being on. I love wasps now.

Well, it's an honor to be here. Thank you. So ask passionate people about unsung underdogs. And look, you respect wasps now. I know you do. Just let them have their space and everyone's going to be fine. So get Eric's book wasps, the astonishing diversity of a misunderstood insect. Wherever books are sold, you'll find a link in the show notes.

You can find his work on his blog, bugeric.blogspot.com. He's on Twitter at bug Eric. We are at oligies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at Allie Ward, 1L on both. Please be my friend. You can join the family at patreon.com slash oligies costs a dollar a month to get in. Also, hello to everyone on the oligies podcast subreddit. Thank you, Aaron Talbert for admitting the oligies podcast Facebook group.

Hello, oligies merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. Thank you, Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Feltis for managing that. Emily White of the Wordery does our professional transcripts. Kayla Patton does the bleeping and transcripts and bleeped episodes are linked in the show notes that are on my website. Thank you, Susan Hale and Noel Dillworth for keeping oligies engines running. It's been a wacky couple of months. We are shooting double our usual schedule for Innovation Nation.

Plus, I took a few extra TV show consulting jobs this year and I'm getting married in a few weeks to editor, Jared Sleeber, a very handsome, smart person. Hi, hi, Jared. Things have been, let's just say, very active at Ward HQ lately. Thank you as always to co-editor Stephen Ray Morris, always a busy bee and a wonderful wasp himself. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands did the theme music. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret.

And this week, I will tell you in grammar school, I still feel guilty about this. I was mucking about just getting filthy at recess a lot. I would build like tiny mud houses or what have you. And one day, my friend Steve was like, hey, you want to see a yellow jacket nest? I was like, hell yeah, dude. And me and his friend Brandon walked over to a hill and stopped in front of a hole on the ground and I'm like, where's this nest, y'all?

And Brandon stomped on the hole and the yellow jackets were like, not cool, Brandon. Not cool. We got babies in here. And then they flooded out like a cartoon. And yeah, I got multiple stings in my hand. And yes, I cried like a bee word. But also I was like yellow jackets, well played, a worthy adversary. I have learned even though it wasn't me, it was Brandon that stomped on it. I never would have condoned that.

However, I did get to go home for the rest of the day, which kind of ruled. And watch the prices, right? OK, so respect your flying sharks and drink out of clear glasses. OK, that's all. Bye. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n-g. Fos-f-a-t-l-l-s-t-o-r-i-n. Gesundheit. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n-g.

And membrane order for Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n-g. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n-g. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n. Fos-f-a-t-l-s-t-o-r-i-n-g. Lipids and membrane order precisely regulate the activity of Polybia MP1 peptide. Sure.