As part of it, with Prof Adam Hart, Sumner set up the Big Wasp Survey, a citizen science project to sample populations of social wasps across the UK. The larger, more familiar “social” wasps, of which there are half-dozen species in Ireland, form only 3 per cent of the world’s wasps with stings. Social wasps are opportunistic, random hunters, but Dr Sumner sees a similar potential for them, especially in tropical crops, in “artificially inflated populations”. Social wasps have short tongues for seeking nectar, which explains their springtime throng on the massed, shallow flowers of our big cotoneaster. They currently account for less than 5 per cent of human insect food, but Dr Sumner’s team found reports of their consumption across 19 countries.

Source: The Irish Times May 29, 2021 05:00 UTC