48 Fun Facts About Wasp

Wasps belong to which order of insects?

Hymenoptera. A row of tiny hooks zips each hind wing to the fore wing in flight, so the insect's four wings beat as two; the name is usually read as 'membrane wings'.

What stops wasps from being a clade, or natural group?

Bees and ants evolved from wasp ancestors, so both sit deep inside the wasp family tree; 'wasp' is just the name for what is left of the branch once they are lifted out.

In a hornet or yellowjacket nest, which wasps are able to sting?

Only the females. That still covers the queen and every worker, so nearly the whole nest is armed, while the males have no sting at all.

How do most wasp species live?

Only the family Vespidae contains social species; the vast majority of females forage and breed independently.

A wasp's stinger is a modified version of what organ?

The ovipositor. Many wasps still use it as an egg-laying drill, some boring through solid wood to reach a hidden grub, while in the stinging species it delivers venom instead.

A male wasp develops from what kind of egg?

An unfertilised egg. A female stores sperm and decides egg by egg whether to use it, and the result is that a male wasp has no father and can never have a son.

The world's smallest known insect, a wasp just 0.139 mm long, belongs to which group?

Fairyflies. The record-holders are blind, wingless males that cling to a female with their long legs, and they are thought to mate inside the insect egg they hatched in and die there.

In Marvel's comics and films, the Wasp is the long-time partner of which superhero?

Ant-Man. The original Wasp, Janet van Dyne, was also a founding Avenger, and in the comics she is the one who came up with the team's name.

The emerald jewel wasp stings which insect in the brain, then leads it by an antenna like a dog on a leash?

A cockroach. The venom leaves the roach able to walk but takes away its will to escape, so it follows the wasp to her burrow and stays put while her larva eats it alive.

What is the primary material social wasps use to build their nests?

Chewed wood pulp. The wasps scrape fibres from weathered wood, chew them with saliva and spread the paste thin, so the finished nest is a kind of paper.

A British general is said to have called which city 'a hornet's nest of rebellion'?

Charlotte. The line is credited, without proof, to Lord Cornwallis, whose troops met fierce resistance there in 1780, and it is the reason the city's NBA team is called the Hornets.

Adult social wasps feed chewed insects to their larvae; what do the larvae give them in return?

Sugary saliva. Adult wasps live on sugars and never eat the insects they catch, so each grub's sweet droplet is the hunter's own share of the meal.

When are people most often stung by wasps?

Late summer and early autumn. Colonies stop raising new workers then, and the workers already flying go looking for sweet food, which brings them to picnics and bins.

Which birds catch wasps in flight, then rub them on a branch to get rid of the sting?

Bee-eaters. They hunt only on the wing from an open perch, and the beating and rubbing does more than remove the sting: it squeezes most of the venom out of the insect.

Greenhouse growers buy the tiny wasp Encarsia formosa to do what?

Kill whiteflies. Each female lays her eggs inside young greenhouse whiteflies, which turn black as the wasp grows within; growers dropped the wasp when chemical sprays arrived in the 1940s, then took it up again in the 1970s.

Which scientist wrote that wasps whose larvae eat caterpillars alive made him doubt a kindly Creator?

Charles Darwin. In an 1860 letter he said no kindly God would have designed ichneumon wasps to feed inside living caterpillars, and that, not believing that, he saw no need to think the eye was designed either.

Aristophanes' comedy The Wasps, first staged in 422 BC, uses a chorus of wasps to represent whom?

Old jurors. The chorus of elderly Athenians behave like a swarm of angry wasps, and the hero is so hooked on jury duty that his son traps him at home with nets.

Which H. G. Wells novel has a growth formula producing giant wasps, rats and children?

The Food of the Gods. The formula is being tested on chicks at a farm whose careless keepers let it spread, and wasps with three-inch stings are the first giants anyone meets.

Who thanked USS Wasp in 1942 by asking who said a wasp couldn't sting twice?

Churchill. He had asked Roosevelt to send the American carrier on a second run ferrying Spitfires to besieged Malta, and wired the quip once the fighters had flown off.

Why did Wasps miss the 1871 founding of England's Rugby Football Union?

Its delegate went to the wrong venue, and in one telling on the wrong day too, so 21 other clubs founded the union without Wasps, a club named in 1867 when insect names were in fashion.

In Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played with Fire, which character uses 'Wasp' as a hacker handle?

Lisbeth Salander. Her hacker name matches the small wasp tattooed on her neck, and Larsson said he imagined her as a grown-up Pippi Longstocking.

Which insect nicknamed the 'cow killer' looks like an ant but is really a wingless female wasp?

Velvet ant. Its sting is painful enough to earn the 'cow killer' name, yet the insect is not aggressive and stings only to defend itself.

A yellowjacket can usually do what with its stinger?

Sting repeatedly. A honeybee's barbed sting rips out and kills the bee, but a yellowjacket's lance has only small barbs, so it usually slides free to strike again.

Which university's Yellow Jackets sports teams are represented by a mascot named Buzz?

Georgia Tech. The nickname came first: fans in the 1890s wore yellow jackets to games, and the insect mascot only followed decades later.

True hornets belong to which genus?

Vespa. It is simply the Latin word for wasp, which Italian kept, and in 1946 Piaggio borrowed it for a little scooter that went on to sell more than a million in ten years.

The bald-faced hornet of North America is named for face markings of which colour?

White. 'Bald' is used as in bald eagle, for a white head, and the insect is misnamed twice over: it is really a black-and-white yellowjacket, not a true hornet.

What nickname did news media give the Asian giant hornet after it turned up in North America?

Murder hornet. Scientists never took it up, and in 2022 the Entomological Society of America went the other way, adopting the plainer 'northern giant hornet' as the official common name.

Which US state declared the invasive northern giant hornet eradicated in 2024?

Washington. Crews destroyed the nests found near the Canadian border in 2020 and 2021, and officials then waited through three years without a single confirmed hornet before declaring it gone.

Japanese honeybees mob a giant hornet scout in a tight ball and kill it how?

With body heat. Hundreds of bees warm the ball to a temperature that, together with the carbon dioxide they breathe out, kills the hornet but stays a few degrees below what the bees themselves can stand.

What vital job do tiny fig wasps do for fig trees, which cannot reproduce without them?

Pollination. A fig's flowers are sealed inside the young fruit, so a female wasp has to force her way in through a pore so tight it usually tears off her wings, and she dies inside.

In many fig wasp species the wingless males never leave their fig, but first do what for the females?

Chew them an exit tunnel. The males hatch first, mate with the females inside the fig, dig the way out and die, so it is the winged females alone that fly off to another tree.

Figs produce which enzyme to digest the dead wasps inside them?

Ficain. The enzyme, also called ficin, breaks the dead wasp's body down so the fig can absorb it, which is why the crunch in a ripe fig is only seeds.

Paper wasps of the genus Polistes are sometimes called umbrella wasps because of what?

The shape of their nests. Hornets and yellowjackets wrap their combs in a paper shell, but these wasps hang a single bare comb from a short stalk, its cells open underneath like an umbrella.

A study of European paper wasps found individuals with brighter warning colours were what?

More venomous. Wasps with brighter yellow turned out to have larger venom glands, so the colours are an honest warning: the showier the wasp, the worse the sting a bird can expect.

How do cuckoo wasps defend themselves against angry hosts?

Curling into a ball like a pill bug. These jewel-bright wasps cannot sting, but a hollowed underside lets them tuck in legs and antennae, so a host that catches one in its nest finds nothing to bite or sting.

What does a tarantula hawk do with a tarantula it stings?

Lays a single egg on it in a burrow. The sting only paralyses the spider, so the grub that hatches has fresh food for weeks, and it saves the vital organs for last to keep its meal alive.

Which US state adopted a tarantula hawk as its official insect in 1989?

New Mexico. The campaign began with an Edgewood elementary class, which picked three candidate insects and mailed ballots to schools across the state; the wasp won the vote.

Which desert animal is one of the few predators that will eat tarantula hawk wasps?

Roadrunners. Most hunters leave the wasps alone because of the huge sting, which is also why harmless moths, flies and beetles have evolved to copy their colours.

Which entomologist created the sting pain index by letting dozens of insects sting him?

Justin Schmidt. He wrote up each sting like a wine critic, calling a sweat bee's 'light, ephemeral, almost fruity', and shared an Ig Nobel Prize for the work in 2015.

Which insect was originally the only one given the top score of 4 on the best-known sting pain index?

The bullet ant. Its sting is said to feel like being shot, and boys of Brazil's Sateré-Mawé people prove themselves by wearing gloves woven with the live ants.

Growths that tiny wasps cause on oak trees were for centuries a main ingredient of what?

Iron gall ink. Crushed oak galls mixed with iron salts gave Europe its standard writing ink for well over a thousand years, until modern inks replaced it in the twentieth century.

Which group of wasps builds vase-like mud nests attached to twigs or walls?

Potter wasps. The female rolls soil, water and saliva into pellets to build each little jug, and she usually lays her egg in the empty pot before she fills it with food for the grub.

Which harmless flies wear yellow and black stripes that make birds mistake them for wasps?

Hoverflies. They have no sting, but birds that have learned to steer clear of wasps tend to leave the look-alikes alone as well, a bluff known as Batesian mimicry.

The 'wasp waist' silhouette of 19th-century women's fashion was produced by which garment?

Corset. Laced tight, it pinched the middle to echo a wasp's narrow body, and the fashion kept coming back even as doctors and dress reformers of the day warned women against it.

Wasps first appear in the fossil record in which geological period?

Jurassic. Wasps arose from sawflies, plant-feeders whose own fossils go back to the Triassic, and swapped that plant diet for hunting and parasitising other insects.

Unlike bees, how do pollen wasps carry pollen back to their nests?

In a crop inside the body. They swallow the pollen, then bring it up again with nectar as a soup for their young, a bee-like diet that no other wasps feed their larvae.

Hammer orchids and mirror orchids lure male wasps by imitating what?

A potential mate. The flower copies a female wasp's shape, colour and even scent, and when a male grabs a hammer orchid's decoy and tries to fly off with it, a hinge swings him into the flower instead.

Parasitoid wasps helped inspire the monster in which film?

Alien. In the 1979 film the creature's young grows inside a crew member and bursts out of his chest, much as these wasps' grubs feed inside a living host and kill it as they leave.