Summer flowers are blooming and vegetable gardens are beginning to produce — all thanks to the many pollinators buzzing around.
But there’s one pollinators that may deserve more recognition — wasps.
Most flying insects, such as wasps, bees, flies and more, pollinate as they move from plant to plant seeking nectar, which they ingest for energy
Kate Borchardt is a post-doctoral researcher at University of California who completed her PhD at The Iowa University focusing on the behavior of wasps.
She said when most people think about pollinators, they picture honeybees and bumblebees, but, in reality, these are thousands of different species performing this important work.
“The main thing for people to know is that [wasps] are very important for our environment,” Borchardt said. “They just need a little bit more space sometimes than some of the other critters that we see, and there are ways to coexist with them.”
She said there is a large disparity in the amount of research done on different pollinators' roles in the environment — often influenced by how positively humans perceive the species.
“Bees are kind of vegetarian wasps. Wasps use prey as their protein source and to raise their offspring — bees use pollen,” Borchardt said. “And [wasps have] been overlooked historically, because they're not as fuzzy. They're switching between modes, you know, ‘Am I going to catch this caterpillar? Am I going to visit this flower?’”
Borchardt said that her research found that wasps are comparable to bees when it comes to plant interactions and the transfer of pollen. But, she stressed, more research still needs to be done.
“I think the role that wasp, bees are playing, especially in plant pollination, is still yet to be determined,” she said. “My study, as far as I could tell, was one of the first that did single visit deposition. It's a little more difficult to do in wasps, but now we have methods to apply that to other plant systems and wasp groups.”
Borchardt added that it’s important for people to remember that wasps, on top of playing a role in pollination, are also free pest control.
“They're helping to control the pests, the caterpillars, the other things that are eating the plants in your garden or the crops that were growing in the field,” Borchardt said.
Emily Althoff, an urban entomologist with MU Extension and Lincoln University, says most people picture paper nest wasps, hornet or yellow jackets when they think of “wasps."
“They're helping to control the pests, the caterpillars, the other things that are eating the plants in your garden or the crops that were growing in the field."Dr. Kate Borchardt
She says these are all social species, meaning they live in colonies — the nests you might see on your patio or porch — and they can be more aggressive, as they are protecting their community.
“But the majority of the species that exist, both with our bees and with our wasps, are actually solitary in nature,” Althoff said. “Whether they are living in burrows underground, whether they are living in different reeds or things that would be on the ground or in dried up plant material, they reside in solitary locations.”
Althoff said there's a lot of benefit to an environment if humans and wasps can co-exist, but she realizes there are situations when this isn't possible.
Both she and Borchardt agree that the best way to remove a wasp nest, if necessary, is to do it late-May and June — when the colony is not yet large and there is still time for a queen to reproduce elsewhere.
Then to prevent stings, it’s best to remove the nest at night or during a rainstorm when wasps are less active.
“Before you do that, though, you should go out and observe the nest and make sure that you know where they're going, if they're going in and out of the nest,” Althoff said. “So then you have, in a way, an escape route if something goes askew.”
