One million years later, wasps modified the ovipositor into a sting - no egg travels down this, only venom. Parasitic wasp (Gasteruption jaculator) male resting on leaf, Hertfordshire, England. Perhaps you’ve unleashed some in your own home as a natural way to rid your clothes and furniture of clothes moths. Farmers release them into their crop fields as tiny agents of war on pests. Diverse and numerous, it’s no surprise that humans have exploited their abilities to kill other insects for our own gain. There, her baby has all it needs to feast on an oblivious wet nurse, from the inside out. With the steel of a high-class assassin, she tumbles an egg down her long ovipositor to lay it inside her host. From snuggly beetle larva burrowed deep under the bark of your apple tree to sumptuous caterpillar curled within the fronds of your cabbages, our corseted wasp will seek it out by smell and vibrations. It is the envied gift of an acrobat, affording her abdomen yogic manoeuvrability, permitting the delivery of a precious egg to its dinner in the most elusive places.

Her fashion has changed little over the past 240 million years, ever since evolution bestowed on her the ‘wasp waist’. Admire her slender form: she wears a sleek and shapely outfit. Together with their larger (but shyer) relatives the hornets, there are only 70 species of these insects - that’s 0.07% of all wasps, yet these are what most people will inevitably picture. These are ‘yellowjackets’ or vespine wasps. One million species of wasps? Perplexed? You are well acquainted with wasps from your summer picnics - the black-and-yellow-striped insects that buzz around your barbecue with the entitlement of a self-obsessed toddler at Christmas. Scientists also estimate that there are likely to be at least 10 times more species of wasps than are currently described, taking the likely number to more than a million. Compare this with a mere 22,000 bees and 13,000 ants. In fact, if we were to label our world according to what is most numerous, wasps would be a strong contender, with more than 100,000 described species. Jewel wasp (Ampulex compressa) leading American cockroach (Periplaneta americana) prey to nest by antennae.

Welcome to the world of wasps, where evolution has had an awful lot of fun - sometimes gruesome, sometimes grand, but always awesome. This is no work of fiction: it is the work of a jewel wasp paralysing a cockroach to feed her offspring. She nestles her own baby in his arms and bids farewell, safe in the knowledge that her offspring will grow to be as beautiful and deadly as she by supping on her slave. Zombified, her victim can just about walk, but he cannot resist his assassin as she leads him gently to his underground tomb. Seirian Sumner, author of ‘Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps’, explains a few of the reasons that you might want to hold off calling the pest controller - and, indeed, why you it might be time to start providing wasp nesting houses in your garden, alongside that designer bee hotel.Ĭreeping through the undergrowth, she spies her victim and pounces one quick punch to the chest disables him enough so that she can insert her prize dagger into the precise location in his brain for the neurotoxin she’s prepared.

Yes, they're a pain at your summer barbecue, but wasps are also voracious predators of other insects - and some of Nature’s most important pest controllers.

Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardeners.

Credit secrets book