Wasps almost make me bottle it

IN general I’m not nervous of insects and I’m usually the person designated to remove the spiders from the bath.

I try to retain a benign attitude to all forms of wildlife and I’m lucky enough not to suffer from any unpleasant allergies to stings and bites. I even kept a few hives of bees once.

But the benign attitude was tested to breaking point the other day when I paid a long overdue visit to the bottle bank. I was trying to make this a low-key affair because I was slightly embarrassed by the tonnage of glass of which I was disposing. The neighbours might not realise that it was mostly jam jars and olive oil bottles and think I had developed a serious alcohol problem.

But my attempt to be surreptitious was sabotaged the moment I opened the car door because I was invaded by an aggressive swarm of wasps. They were everywhere — inspecting every bottle, flying in and out of the fibreglass bins, crawling over my hands and filling the car.

I tried to appear calm, though I wasn’t really, and I managed to avoid getting stung. This, I told myself , calmly and logically, was late August when wasp behaviour changes. Up to now they’ve been going about their business, which mostly involves being carnivores and carrion eaters. But then they sense the onset of autumn and get a craving for sugar.

They hang around the bottle bank, like an alcoholic waiting on a street corner for the pub to open, in anticipation of their next fix of jam and beer.

There are many different species of wasp in Ireland and it’s quite difficult to tell them apart. The main difference between a common wasp and a German wasp, for example, is that the German wasp has three black dots on its face where the common wasp has a black anchor-shaped pattern. You have to get quite close and personal with the insect to make this out.

There are also social wasps and solitary wasps. The ones I was trying to avoid getting up close and personal with may have been common and may have been German but they were definitely social wasps. The irony of it all was that, however much sweetness they managed to lap up at the bottle bank, most of them were going to die in the next few weeks.

Among Irish social wasps only the queen survives the winter. She is noticeably larger than a normal wasp and mates with several males during the late summer. She stores their sperm in a sac in her body, stocks up on sugars and hibernates for the winter. A popular hibernation site round here is the shed I use as a workshop. In the spring she wakes up, starts to build a nest and fertilises her own eggs with the stored sperm. Then a new colony is born and it can grow to several thousand individuals before next autumn arrives and the cycle is repeated — usually with a new and younger queen.

Most people know a wasp can sting repeatedly while a bee dies after using its weapon. This is because wasps, unlike bees, are normally carnivores and use their stings for hunting. But the sting is a modified ovipositor, a female sexual organ, so only female wasps can sting. Consoled by this, I confronted the problem of trying to remove about 30 wasps, that were crawling over the empty plastic bags and cardboard boxes in the back of the car.

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