Are wasps useful?

Hunters in the service of the brood

In spring and early summer, a wasp colony is above all one thing: an efficient hunting team. Workers fly out from dawn until dusk to catch flies, midges, caterpillars and aphids. This prey is chopped up and fed to the larvae in the nest, which need protein in order to grow. Over the course of a season, a single medium-sized colony can therefore remove considerable numbers of insects from a garden — significantly more than many other native beneficial insects manage. If you have fewer aphids and caterpillars in your garden, you often have the wasps in the neighbourhood to thank for it.

Quiet pollinators

Alongside hunting, wasps regularly visit flowers to supply themselves with nectar. In doing so, pollen sticks to their bodies and is carried to the next bloom. Wasps are certainly less efficient pollinators than bees or bumblebees, but they still make a measurable contribution to the pollination of many wild and cultivated plants. In a healthy ecosystem, the wasp’s hunting and pollination work complements what other insects do.

Why their reputation is poor all the same

The wasp’s bad reputation is almost entirely a late-summer phenomenon. As soon as there are no larvae left to feed in the nest, the workers need quick energy for themselves in the form of sugar and become conspicuous around fruit, sweet drinks and the coffee table. This behaviour has nothing to do with the ecological benefit these insects bring, however — it is merely a brief phase in the natural life cycle of the colony. For more on what wasps eat at which time of year, see our guide What do wasps eat. Our article on the wasp colony provides an overview of social structure and life cycle, while our pillar guide Wasps: the most important facts at a glance offers a general introduction to the subject. To identify individual species, use the species overview.