No not the song by Wiz Khalifa, which in itself was awful, but this weeks post is about the common wasp, something I thought up until a few years ago had no purpose in life, but even after finding that out, I still think it doesn’t…….
Summer days, Time for picnics in the park, long country walks or a trip to the beach, all in the attempts to worship the sun, feel good about yourself and generally have a good time, that is until you hear this faint buzzing, slowly getting louder and louder, you turn your head but you can’t see where it’s coming from, you continue to look around until you feel something land on your arm, you look down to see a wasp looking back at you just as it buries the contents of its poison sac into you.
Ok, that was probably a little dramatic and if anything, a wasp sting is nothing, apart from burning like a red-hot poker has been shoved under your skin, but if anything it’s just annoying, As I stated in the brief I did find out a few years ago what purpose a wasp actually had, this only came around after a trip to the beach though.
During this time I was still at university and had a coursework assignment to finish, it was the weekend and I was asked if I’d like to go to the beach, although I had my work to do I felt I could kill two birds with one stone and decided to take my work with me, better than sitting at home on my own. So after we arrived at the beach I decided to get as much work done as I could before I started having fun, last thing I wanted to do was jump in the sea, then try to get my work done only for sea water to wash all my work away.
After about half an hour I looked up from my work to find I had a wasp buzzing around me, I never really freak out about insects so with a swing that would make a cricketer blush, I batted the wasp away, thinking I’d gotten rid of it, I went back to my work only to hear a faint buzzing again, so I look up and…well, i wasn’t entirely sure if it was the same wasp, but again I batted that one away as well, this repeated itself another three times before eventually, if it was the same one, it landed next to me. By this point I was so irritated by it that I smashed my book down on it in a rage, killing it and burying it all at the same time making my friends turn around wondering what all the commotion was about, after that I didn’t see any more wasps.
Now I don’t enjoy killing insects, but wasps are really irritating when they want to be, they’re like the chavs of the insect world, constantly provoking you that you can’t do anything to them until they push you too far and make you snap, then they find they’re not so clever after all, not that they had many brain cells to begin with, chavs that is….
But after that incident I decided to find out what use in the world the common wasp actually has, So a quick search on Wikipedia told me that wasps are actually pest controllers and that for every pest, there is a wasp associated with it, so under that premise…..how are we a pest to the common wasp? What did I do to deserve being tormented by it at the beach or people being stung by them for no reason?
If anything they’re the pest, though that does create an ironic vicious circle for them….
Some people asked me if I’d had any food with me to which the answer was no, I do honestly think the common wasp enjoys tormenting us, they have no reason to fly around us and follow us watching our every move, unless they are super secret drones created by the government to watch the population, but that’s a silly idea, on both fronts really because it must be costing them a fortune to keep replacing them after we’ve sprayed, squashed, stamped on and trapped them, but no, it’s a silly notion, the government wouldn’t do that….would they…..
But I digress, on the subject of wasps though, I should really encompass the whole insect kingdom, not that it annoys me because it doesn’t, just the wasps really, but we do have a funny attitude towards insects I find, I pointed this fact out to my mother when we were having a cup of tea, mainly on the subject of ants.
Now I’ve always been fascinated by ants, how their system works, how they can follow an almost exact straight line to somewhere that if you sized them up to us would be nearly one hundred miles away, and back again carrying something that weighs nearly three times then they do, though that just brings up chavs again……
I’ve found myself just watching them in the back garden on occasions because everything they do is so efficient while the rest of the world is quite frankly chaotic, and I’m sure there are other people reading this, well maybe, that find ants as fascinating as I do.
That is however until they enter your house.
Because as soon as that happens out comes the kettle full of boiling water straight down the entrance to the nest, though failing to take into account that the ants already have another exit anyway, but failing that attempt, the ant powder comes out making the ants feel like a nuclear winter has just taken hold and then stomping on them like a sci-fi robot from a bad B-movie in every effort to stop them invading your house….So in a way, ants are like wasps, they’re fine until they invade your personal space.
However, as much as Wikipedia wants to say it, I still think the common wasp is useless…..
