this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2023
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I've killed 5 nests in last 30 days. The can be so aggressive.
Humans: "Give wasps a chance!"
Wasps: "Fuck humans. Fuck them all. Over and over. With your ass spikes. Bonus points if you take out an eye."
I mean, they have a point.
Only some wasp is nasty. There's a huge amount of species of them that's very important to the ecology, not aggressive, and also am pollinator. Fig wasp, for example, is crucial for pollinate fig and isn't nasty at all.
Until they’ve had a drink. A few glasses of that fermented fig juice and they think they’re all Bald Faced Hornets.
In know your comment isn't serious but do you know how wasps pollinate figs?
It's pretty cool, the fig is actually a load of flowers pointing in towards the middle of what we think of as the "fruit". Each variety of fig has a specific species of female wasp that burrows in and then lays its eggs inside. The male larvae hatch first, fertilise the female larvae, burrow out and die. The females then hatch, use the burrows to exit and fly off to find a new fig. The female wasps fertilise the figs in this process. Some wasps end up trapped inside the fig and get partially dissolved by an enzyme...
Some commercial varieties have been bred to fertilise themselves but in the wild the figs don't ripen without the wasps.
https://www.foodunfolded.com/article/figs-wasps-how-plant-and-pollinator-work-together
Yea, and yes :). We had a large old fig tree in SW France. It was fascinating and I swear they did get drunk (but not, in all, honesty that fighty).
To be fair those may have been normal wasps eating the figs and not the type that normally fertilise it? We have a few apple trees in our garden and wasps definitely get pretty dopey when they are eating overripe apples...
Wasps don’t give a fuck about you; don’t walk up to their nests and slap them and you’ll be fine. They’re defensive creatures rather than aggressive.
They also serve as excellent pest control. I tend to just leave them be unless they build a nest near a door that would be problematic.
Hornets, on the other hand, are indeed aggressive and can indeed go fuck themselves.
Hornets are my bros, they're super chill here and all they do is hunt wasps.
No but seriously, no hornet has ever given a fuck about me or my food. And whenever one rocks up, all the wasps are suddenly gone and hiding, it's hilarious.
You clearly have never encountered a yellowjacket, let alone lived your whole life in a country where yellowjackets are (at least seemingly) 99.999% of all the wasps.
I can count on one hand, two at most, how many of the times being stung by a yellowjacket was my own fault for bothering it and the total number of times I've been stung is hundreds if not thousands.
On behalf of spheksophobes everywhere, thank you for your heroic efforts! 🫡