Stuff You Should Know - Wasps: Not as cute as bees

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Wasps have a bad rap. Because their sting really hurts and they don't make honey like their cousins. But they are super cool and you shouldn't kill them. Listen and learn! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, it's us and we're here to talk to you about, get this, our book. We have a stuff you should know book coming out this November and you're going to love

it and you can pre-order it now. That's right. It's called stuff you should know, colon, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things and it's been a lot of fun to work on and we're really, I mean, genuinely excited about how this thing has come together. Yep, it's 26 chunky hairy chapters that are just going to knock your socks clean off and yes Chuck, we are indeed proud of this book. It is truly indubitably the first stuff you should know book and it's coming out this

November and you can order it now, pre-order, everywhere you get books. So do that and we thank you in advance. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's out there somewhere which makes this stuff you should nezzoooo. Yeah, old school insect dish from Robert Lam.

I know, it's got mouth parts in it but it's no Tracy Wilson joint. Yeah, it's Tracy. But it's still good, it's super charming. Robert starts this article out from the perspective of a spider who has been dragged into a wasp nest and is about to be eaten alive by a wasp larva. Yeah. It's pretty interesting. Yeah.

It's a good article I guess is what I'm trying to say and if you are not familiar with Robert Lam then friends, you are missing out on not one but two, no, three really great podcasts that that guy has put out. What is it stuffed below your mind? Of course, the stalwart science tech, well not tech, sort of science plus show. Yes, yeah, yeah, in depth like super deep rabbit hole, interesting stuff and then he did one called Transhuman. Yeah, that's a fiction scripted sci-fi, very cool.

Yeah, and then also he and Joe who he does stuff to blow your mind with also do Invention 2, which is kind of an in-depth rabbit hole thing about invention, so check all those out everybody. Yeah, it was fun to kind of get back to basics with a nice little insect cast on wasps and dude, I went outside today on my side deck to let the dogs out and lo and behold, I looked ... What? I was, you said who let the dogs out.

Sorry. You said let the dogs out, so I had to, I thought you were saying wait, wait, wait. No, no, I was saying whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Oh boy, that was a wasp nest on the ground. Okay, good, all right, sorry, did I knock the legs out from under that story? Yeah, it was just a wasp nest, but it was the timing. Was it live? Oh, I didn't poke it to see, it was not attached, I think it had fallen, so my guess is that

it did not have any more wasps residing in it. Man, that's got to be a real let down because it's the middle of summer right now, so there are, they're wanting to like grow, there was probably larvae in there, huh? Yeah. That's really weird, they must have abandoned it then. Yeah, and wasps are, I think, everyone loves the bees now because they should because bees are awesome and bees produce honey and we want bees to stick around, but I think wasps and hornets which are a type of wasps are still just so maligned and they're the one

ones that people will reach for their can of raid to spray. No qualms. Yeah, and you shouldn't, don't do it, let the wasp live, I'll go ahead and say it now, we're going to say it a bunch, but let them live. Totally, Chuck, thank you, yeah, we're here to open everyone's eyes to the function and purpose of wasps existence. They're not like mosquitoes, remember in the mosquitoes episode we basically concluded that there's no reason for mosquitoes to be around and they just are terrible, wasps

are not like that, and I think Robert does a really good job of basically pinning down why wasps get such a bad rap. One is that their stings pack such a wallop compared to other stinging insects. Yeah, it hurts. And we'll talk about their stings in the venom that goes along with it, which is so, okay, that's fair, like nobody wants to be stung by a wasp, it's really, it can ruin your day. And then also the other thing is that if you pay attention to wasps, you realize that they

live these really brutal, grizzled existences, they're predators, and in fact in their habitats they're apex predators, they're like sharks and lions, but for the bugs and sometimes small animals that live around there, like I didn't watch any of the videos that I could have because I'm just really over animal death, even if it's nature. Oh, really? Yeah. When I was doing the end of the world with Josh Clark, I went into it just feeling fine about that, that's just nature, that's the way things work.

And then one of the guys I talked to is David Pierce, who you and I talked to actually first in our Super Stuff Guide to Happiness, but I went back and interviewed him and his whole jam is we could actually eventually engineer the biosphere so that there isn't any suffering among animals and what we take as natural isn't necessarily have to be that way, and it's really changed how I view violence even among animals. So anyway, the upshot is I didn't watch any videos, but one of the ones that I saw, the title was Wasp Kills Baby Bird, so that video is out there if you want to see that, but I just can't, I don't like to see that stuff anymore, you know?

Yeah. I mean, I didn't really enjoy it before, but now it just downright bothers me. Yeah, I get it. I live with a person who can't watch anything like that, so I get it. So there are more than 20,000 species of wasp, and like I said, hornets are a kind of wasp, so if you hear, I mean, you would call a hornet a hornet, but you can't necessarily use them interchangeably, but a hornet is a wasp. And there's a lot of, you know, over that 20,000 species, there are a lot of different

kinds and a lot of variety as far as what they look like and what their shape like and what color they are and how they'd like to live their life. But as with every insect cast, we're going to go over those body parts. Sure. Because mouth parts is in there somewhere. And it starts with exoskeleton, just like all the little insect buddies have that chitin exoskeleton. And in the case of the wasp, they are very segmented out.

They have three segments that get your head, which has got those antennae, the sensory antennae. You have those mouth parts because they lick and they bite. And then you have the very cool-looking compound eyes and simple eyes, these sort of kidney-shaped eyes of a wasp that are very sort of signature. What are they known as in your Italian accent? Ocelli. So in the Italian, if a vowel follows a C, it makes a C.

Ocelli? Yeah, it makes a C sound. If a C is followed by an H, it makes a C sound. So is this really pronounced Ocelli? Yeah. Okay. I think among biologists, they probably say Ocelli. But since you're doing the accent, I wanted to set you up for a lesson in Italian.

I appreciate that. Okay, so you've got the head, has some eyes, also has a brain chuck, which I saw supposedly wasps are among the smarter insects out there. They can recognize each other by face, by facial markings. Did you know that? Yeah. Hey, Steve. How you doing?

Sting anyone? I'm doing okay, Ted. Thanks for asking. Just killed the baby bird and some weirdo was filming it and put it on the internet. Well, actually Steve would say, no, I didn't sting anyone because I'm a man and I don't sting. Oh, yeah, that's a really great point, Chuck, which we'll talk more about later. You'd find the stinger in the abdomen, which is the third part, the lowest part of the

wasp body, but only in a female, which I think this is true for bees, too, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, don't remember, we've done a lot of good bee stuff. And then in between those things, you've got the thorax, which has the six little legs, and then those really quick flapping wings. Yeah, so in between the thorax and the abdomen, you have a very narrow waist, which usually is what gives away a wasp. You can look at it and be like, that's a wasp. Yeah.

It's like it's got a corset on, unless it's a hornet. Hornets are much chunkier, more rotund, but they are, like you said, a kind of wasp. And actually, I think the genus that hornets fall under is called Vespa, and Vespa in Italian means wasp. So hornets are wasps in Italian. Okay. Okay. So I think one of the coolest things about the wasp is the history and the evolution

of this thing, along with some pretty horrific stuff that's going to follow. But in the Cretaceous period, about 100 million years ago, you had to kind of take a snapshot of planet Earth to understand how the wasp forms. And back then, they didn't have all these flowering plants like we have now. There were a lot of conifers, and these evergreens depended on the wind to spread their seed around. They weren't counting on the insects to do this kind of thing at this point. And we should also mention that ants are a cousin of the wasp, which makes sense. They look kind of ant-like.

Yeah. I think they finally figured out that ants evolved out of mud-daubbers, they're their closest relative. Okay. Which kind of makes sense. I think they have some ant-like behavior. Yeah, ant-like. So the age of the, during the Cretaceous period, these wasps were carnivores, and they preyed

on spiders and other insects. And as plants started to evolve, they realized that, hey, there's a lot of insects flying around going back and forth. Like we're just using the wind to carry our seed around. Why don't we get these insects to work for us, basically, and they can do the job. Yeah. So that was the rise of the angiosperms, which is, you know, whenever you think of a flower that the bee visits and moves from place to place carrying pollen, that's what an angiosperm

is, rather than having to just depend on the wind, you can depend on the insects. And so eventually over time, these wasps, these early predators that used to feed exclusively on other insects said, well, you know what, this whole nectar thing and the pollen thing, I can get with this. So they started to change their diet from insects to pollen and nectar. But the weird thing is, is rather than developing a way to feed their young from pollen and nectar, like honeybees, which I think is another reason people like bees and don't really realize it, realize it, is that they're little vegetarian vegan animals, you know, they don't hurt anybody.

They'll still defend themselves, but they don't want to go hurt anybody. They're very peaceful. Wasps are not like that because even though they generally, most species of wasps, adults eat nectar and pollen, they still kill other insects to drag back to their nest to feed their young, to raise their young on. So wasps are technically omnivores. At the beginning of their life, they're carnivores, and then later in life, they grow into herbivores. Yeah.

Isn't that amazing? It is. Wasps are way more amazing than I realized. Should we take a break and talk about their stinger? Yes. All right. We'll be right back for Stinger Talk. Hey, friends.

When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, welcome to Stinger Talk. I'm Chuck. I'm Josh. No, I'm Ted. I guess that makes me Steve.

Wash stings are tough. You kind of mentioned early on, you get a yellow jacket and that doesn't feel great. Obviously, we're talking about if you're non-allergic and it's not like a legitimate threat to your health and it's just the pain of the sting that we're rating here. Yellow jacket sting isn't great. But a wash sting and a hornet sting is really something else. I feel like it hurts more and for longer. And for good reason, because it actually does.

Bee venom is its own thing, shares a lot in common with wasp venom. Wasp venom seems to be this extraordinarily highly developed biological weapon that is this cocktail of different kinds of compounds that all come together to produce a horrible pain sensation that lasts longer and has a greater impact on your body than anything the actual sting produces. That's apparently the whole reason behind it is it makes the wasp seem way less vulnerable than they actually are. It seems like they're way more powerful.

For all intents and purposes, they are, but if you could take the venom out of the sting, the sting would do basically nothing to you. But because the venom is introduced by that sting, that venom is so potent, it's like one of the worst things in the world to get stung by a wasp. Yeah. And the actual stinger itself has a pretty remarkable evolutionary story. So here's what happens in the prehistoric times is parasitic wasp would use this ovipositor. It's actually, you know, the egg laying organ.

They would use this pointy thing to lay the egg on a living insect. Like they would lay the egg on the caterpillar, then these little larvae would hatch out and then they would eat that caterpillar, the larvae would. So at some point, as things are evolving along, Mother Nature says, you know what would be even better than this is if you could saw open that caterpillar with this ovipositor and lay eggs inside of this thing. But that's exactly what happened. Right.

Which made a lot of sense. And I think there's a lot of wasps species or there's at least some that still do this. Like rather than build a nest, they just go find an insect host and lay some eggs on it or lay some eggs in it and then just let the larvae eat the inside out. But most, I think, have evolved to kind of use some different techniques, which we'll talk about in a little bit. But the stinger itself stuck around even after it stopped being used to actually deposit eggs into the insects directly.

That's right. And you talked about the venom that's obviously produced in the venom gland, stored in a little venom sac, little burlap sac inside the wasp body. And then it seeps out. It's a barbless stinger. It's just like a straight little pointy thing. But it seeps out through these little valves and coats the entire stinger. And so they store this stinger inside of a sheath and are always kind of ready to use

it. And like we said, it's only the females because it was an ovipositor. But the males can pretend like they'll rear their little butt your way and say, stay away from me. You don't know if I'm a male or a female, right? You don't want to look too closely, right? Right, which is just hilarious. But also, didn't that show a certain level of intelligence as well?

I think so. Or at the very least, there's some… To bluff. Yeah. To bluff. Yeah. You know? That takes intelligence, which is, I think, another indicator that wasps are amazing.

Yeah. And like you sort of hinted at, the reason this venom is so powerful is it has a couple of functions. One is just the simple function of paralyzing those insects. And the other is a defense. It's meant to sting something much, much larger and have that thing hurt so bad that it thinks it's hurt a lot worse than it is and just wants to get out of there, basically. Right.

And then that combined with their very, usually very bright colorings, because you know, usually the more colorful an animal is, the more toxic it is. Yeah. It's just kind of a universal symbol in nature to just steer clear. And hornets and wasps typically are fairly colorful as far as insects go. So those two things combined can teach a larger animal pretty quickly to just leave them alone. And that's kind of how wasps have made it this long.

I mean, they've been around for more than 100 million years, you know? Yeah. That's a pretty successful species or family of insects. Yeah. And that includes humans, obviously. If you go poking around a hornet's nest or a wasp nest and you get stung, you're not going to finish the job. You're probably just going to get out of there.

Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully you can learn your lesson that first time, you know? Yeah. Or maybe you don't even have to learn it directly. You can just know to stay away from the wasp. So what's in that venom? Oh, some really good stuff.

I actually found even more stuff than Robert included here. There's some peptides and some enzymes. Some of the enzymes include phospholipase, AMB, phospholipase AMB. And these actually break down the membrane and lipid coating of cells in your body to basically spill their guts into your bloodstream. And that includes neurons. Neural cells can be spilled into your bloodstream when they encounter this peptide, which sends a excruciating pain notification to your brain saying, alert, alert.

You're in a tremendous amount of pain. That's just like step one. Yeah. They also have norepinephrine in there, which stops the blood flow temporarily. And that's why like that, when I said it feels like it lasts longer, I feel like that's the norepinephrine at work because it just sort of sits in one place and eventually the bloodstream is going to kind of dilute it away, but it kind of hangs out there for a little while.

Yeah. That's just mean. There's also acetylcholine, which actually goes to your pain receptors and stimulates them. Right? Wow. And there's also histamines. And histamines are released by your body.

They're responsible for the inflammatory response. But they also, the venom in a wasp's venom includes histamines directly too, just to make sure that it gets that inflammation good and primed. Yeah. And then there's, I was hoping you would take this part because of that word. You want to try it? Hyaluronicase. Oh, well.

Well, I use hyaluronic acid under my eyes. Oh, do you really? I'm familiar. Sure. What's that? It's like an acid that you put under your eyes. I don't know. I think for bags and just to generally keep, yeah, yeah, yeah, just to keep your eyes looking

sharp. Oh, wow. I noticed your eyes always look so sharp. I thought, I thought you'd notice eventually. So that thing that you just talked about and then something, Hyaluronidase. MCDP, mass cell, degranulating peptide, this stuff actually melts through the connective tissue between cells and basically just sort of, it destroys those membranes and allows the venom to move a little more freely than it would ordinarily.

Yeah. So the mass cell, a degranulating peptide, degranulating means that it basically goes to your mass cells and squeezes the histamines out of them. So not only does it contain histamines already, not only does it trigger a histamine response or release, it goes and gets it out of the cells that normally carry it around in your immune system. So it's just really mean, nasty stuff. One of the other things I saw that they've just started to kind of pay attention to is

called bradykinin and it's associated with chronic pain. Wow. So on top of acute pain production, they're like, how about a little dose of what it feels like to have chronic pain too in the mix of all of this stuff. And then Chuck, tell me this is an astounding. I got a couple more. One thing is just called antigen five, which is a cryptic as it comes. They don't know exactly what role it plays, but they know it's a very powerful allergen.

And then there's a couple of peptides that are antimicrobial, which prevent the wasp from contracting an infection from a prey that puts its stinger in. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Like this is some amazing stuff. Yeah. And I didn't see, I saw that hornets can sting again and again and again, but I don't know

about the wasp in general. Is that the case? Yes, definitely. Okay. Mm-hmm. Because a hornet is just a type of wasp. So you've got like mud daubers, the kind of wasp, a hornet is a kind of wasp. And there's like many types of hornets, but they're all wasps.

That's right. You know? Uh-huh. So yeah, they can sting again and again and again, which apparently is another reason why their sting hurts so bad. They can do this to you and inject this venom into you. I saw one expert interviewed on a different House of Works article that said an average of 10 times.

If you get stung by a wasp, usually you're going to get stung more than once, and it can be 10 times, I guess on average. I don't know if they just pulled that out of the air, but they were a wasp expert. So hopefully not. Well, you know those murder hornets that are making the news these days in the States. Those things can kill small rodents with a full charge of a sting. Right. The Asian giant hornet, which they found, I think, I think three of them in the Pacific

Northwest that they thought they got rid of last year, but it turns out they survived the winter, a queen did. Yeah. And, you know, they call them murder hornets because they kill bees. And those, I didn't know this, it was a big, because it was just sort of a back page thing, but in 2016, a package of murder hornets was intercepted at San Francisco International Airport. And they destroyed that, so it didn't become a thing, but they're a real threat to bees.

So that's why people are sort of writing about murder hornets now, invading as an invasive species here in the U.S. Yeah. And I mean, like it's really doing an injustice to the hornets, unfortunately, because calling them murder hornets, like if you read some of the articles on it, like people will say outright, like, oh, they'll, they can kill people very easily. And that's just absolutely not true. And it makes it sound like they're a threat to humans.

Like you said, the big threat is to honeybees, and specifically it's to European honeybees, because they haven't evolved around murder hornets or Asian giant hornets. Asian honeybees have, and they actually have a defense to where when the giant hornets show up, like you were saying they just, like murder hornet is a good term if you're a honeybee, because just a few of them showing up at a hive can just destroy a colony in a few hours. And they do it in a really brutal way. They decapitate the bees and just kill an entire colony in a few hours. And they do it because they're one of the few species that they're omnivorous, but most

of their food comes from meat. They're mostly carnivores. So they're eating all these bees, basically. Yeah. They just carry your baby right off out of its crib, but they can wipe out a whole colony like this. So if we run into an Asian honeybee colony, those bees have developed a response where they'll swarm around one of the Asian giant hornets, and they'll flap their wings a bunch

and generate heat, and they'll cook the hornet alive inside the swarm. That's their defense. European honeybees, which make up a lot of the honeybees, most of the honeybees in the United States, they don't have that defense. So it's a big problem if the Asian giant hornet gets a foothold here. Yeah, and it will pack a lot more of a punch, too. They have about seven times potency as a honeybee's venom. And as far as the pain scale, they likened it.

Getting stung by a murder hornet is, they likened it to like between three and 10, like if you were to be stung by three to 10 yellow jackets all at once. So awful. Yeah. Because a yellow jacket sting is nothing to sneeze at either, that's a kind of wasp, you know? I haven't been stung in a long, long time, knock wood. Knock on wood.

I got stung a couple summers ago. I'm not allergic or anything, but my story, I told it back with the bee thing, was when I was hiking that time, and I got tagged 11 times in the face and neck when I stumbled. It was one of those underground hives that I just walked over, and you see two or three bees, you're like, oh, what's going on? Then you see 10, and then all of a sudden they're everywhere, and you're just running like a moron through the woods, toward the river basically. But yeah, I got hit 11 times, and you know, that could have killed me if I was allergic

out in the middle of nowhere like that. Sure. I thought you were allergic. So we just lied on the episode of the stuff you should know to be shown. Yeah. It was painful. There was one, I think that got the deepest on my eyebrow bone, my orbital bone, and it went straight through, and I could almost feel it on my bone, and that's the one.

I had a hard time getting it out. It was so embedded, and it felt like somebody, and I know I used the same analogy back then, but it felt like somebody had a tiny little, you know, little nails you hang pictures with. It felt like somebody had that poking that bone, and they were just tapping it with a hammer in this like regular beat. That is awful. It was terrible. Man alive.

Yeah, it sounds like you stepped on a yellow jacket nest, because they nest in the ground. And they follow you, too, like they were going to come after me until I got... Where you going, huh? I think we should take a break, maybe, and talk about nesting right after this. Yeah. Hey, friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn?

So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the Backyard Guest House over childhood home. Now, the extra income helps pay her mortgage. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb, too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Okay, Chuck, so we're moving on from Venom. I think we made our point. Venom from Wasps is pretty serious. If you want to avoid getting injected with Venom from Wasps, you want to learn to know what a wasp nest looks like, so you can avoid the wasp nest altogether, because some wasps are more aggressive than others. If you get anywhere near their nest, they're going to be like, let me just give you a little lesson about getting close to my nest, and they'll sting you, right?

Yes. You want to get away. So the kinds of nests that you see hanging from trees, that's a kind of wasp nest. That's a paper wasp nest. There's mud dauber nests, there's nests in the ground that are yellow jacket nests. Wasps make a bunch of different kinds of nests, and for you to survive in the world, you have to know what each one looks like and be able to sense them out with your nose. Yes.

When I think of wasp nest in Georgia, at least, I think of that honeycomb style, where it's just a bunch of little tiny holes, and it looks like it's made out of paper because it kind of is, in a way. Yes. I think those are bald-faced hornets or wasps. I can't remember which one. I think those are the wasps. They actually chew up wood fragments that they'll get from, say, your deck, or if your

kid only has those old-timey wood toys, they might chew those up if they're in the yard. Then they take that and turn it into actual pulp, like paper, and they spit it out and make basically a paper mache nest, which is pretty impressive. But that's why those things look like they're paper mache because they basically are. Yes. They're light-like paper mache, and they're fairly intricate. If you look at them, some of them have what look like little roof eaves. They can be, like I said, super light, so they can be dangling from a really small sort

of thread-like... I don't even know what you would call it, just a... A thread? Yes, sort of like thread, I guess. Suspension cable? Yes, suspension cable, exactly. We'll go with that because it sounds like it's a little sturdier. Although, is that the kind that you found in your yard today? Yes.

Did you let the dogs out? Yes. I found one of those laying on the ground. When I was a kid, the big hornet's nest that are the big... Also, sort of looks like paper mache, but it's more gray, and it doesn't have the little holes. It's just got one central entry point, and it's about as big as a football. Those were sort of like country decor. Did you ever know anyone who had one of those in their house?

Yes. Murderers, serial killers. We'd had one. My dad climbed up a tree to get one of these. It was emptied, thank goodness, and we had that thing mounted on a log above our fireplace for years. Really? Yeah.

That was weird. Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah. I don't remember which kind that is, and I've looked at so much stuff about wasps in the last couple days. I think it was the white-faced hornet, if I'm not mistaken. Okay. Is that who it is?

All right. They're very aggressive. They can get pretty big. Yes. They're big. Like you said, the size of a football, their nests can get pretty big, but that's a good one to avoid. I didn't realize that they were aggressive, huh?

Yeah. You don't want to mess around with one of those nests. You don't want to go poking it. From what I saw, the mud-daubbers, which actually make theirs out of mud, they're the ones that those tubes that usually come down from the ceiling down the wall, those are actually mud tubes that the mud-dauber has made. Mud-daubers, we should say, they're basically two kinds of wasps in the world, wasps and hornets, social and solitary.

Solitary is exactly what it sounds like. It's just a single wasp, a female, living on her own. She'll mate with some male wasp and then go off, make her own nest, either burrowing into the ground, or if she's a mud-dauber, she'll make a mud nest. When you see a mud-dauber's nest, stop and be like, I respect that because that was made by one single wasp on her own with zero help whatsoever. She made that nest, which I just find extremely impressive by chewing up mud and just slowly but surely building it, spinning mud out onto the wall.

Yeah. If you're a social wasp, it's sort of be like in that they're working for the queen, maybe more than one queen even, but you have these male drones that are there to mate, and you have these female workers who build the nest and they hunt for food and tend to these little larvae, but it's basically all about getting the queen to live through the winter to the next season. They will all leave the nest, and I think the queen is the only thing that overwinters. Isn't that right?

Yeah. If they raise queen larvae, the queen will live until the next winter and start over again, basically creating eggs of sterile female workers to help her to hatch and then help her build up the hive, raise male drones, or no, is the drone the worker? No, drones are male that's just used for reproduction, right? Yeah. Then eventually raise little queens. It's pretty interesting, especially as far as social insects go, there are very few species

of social wasps and hornets, but the ones that are, they're highly social, even among social insects. They have pretty intricate, complex societies. Some of the social wasp nests, I think, including yellow jackets, will have multiple queens, and there's one head queen who has basically beaten up other queens to establish her dominance, and then she'll have the most eggs, and then the next layer down will have the second most eggs and so on and so forth. That takes a certain amount of cooperation to maintain and respect that type of hierarchy

to keep that society functioning the way it should, especially considering you have to reinvent the wheel every year after winter comes and goes. Yeah. And they talk to each other too in a way. They communicate, especially if there's a threat via pheromones, so that's why you were more likely to get swarmed rather than just like if you're an actual threat to a nest. They can send a signal that says, hey, everybody, this jerk over here, this kid has got a stick

and he's coming at us. Yeah. Let's get him. And if they die, actually, they release that. It's like a byproduct of their death is releasing that same pheromone. Yeah. Man down. Basically, they turn into like Harry Dean Stanton and Red Dawn, and they're like, avenge me.

I have that one written down by the way. I guess you didn't see the video then of the tarantula hawk, since you're not into those. No, but I've seen one in person, actually. Yeah. The pepsis wasp is known as a tarantula hawk because they lay eggs inside of a paralyzed tarantula, and the larvae eat the tarantula from the inside out. And I was like, I got to see this. And of course, on YouTube, there is a pepsis wasp battling it out with a tarantula, and

it's no match, and it paralyzes this tarantula and drags him back like a great distance. Yeah. You see a wasp pulling this tarantula across the ground. Which is much, much, much larger, but the tarantula, like you said, is no match. And even among humans, I think that tarantula hawk's sting is like a four out of four on the Schmidt pain scale. Like it's as bad as it gets. Because you know why they asked Mr. Schmidt, how bad does that hurt?

And he's like, oh my gosh, it's terrible. He said, yeah. And they're very bright blue and orange too, which is another indicator, like stay away. If you see anything that's really colorful, just assume it can mess you up pretty good. Yeah, don't lick that. The tarantula hawk, that's the case. Don't lick that colorful frog. So but even if it's not a wasp taking down a tarantula and laying eggs inside it that

eat the tarantula from the inside out, almost all wasps species, if not 100% of wasps species, like we said, they raised their young by paralyzing other insects, dragging them to their nest and laying the eggs nearby, leaving the bug to be paralyzed and still alive when the egg hatches and larvae crawls over and starts eating that bug alive. And this is one reason why wasps have such a bad rat because it's just such a brutal It's like a horror movie. Circle of life. It really is.

Yeah, especially from the perspective of the insect. And apparently Charles Darwin said, when he witnessed this happening to a cute little caterpillar that it made it difficult for him to believe in an omnipresent and beneficent God because what kind of God would allow a cute little caterpillar to do that? The thing is, Charles Darwin, I mean, he liked to putz around in the garden, but he was not a farmer. If you're a farmer, you're probably kind of happy to see a wasp larva eating a caterpillar because caterpillars eat your crops.

And if you ask me, this is where we get to the part about the roles that wasps play in the ecosystem and why you shouldn't just go willy-nilly killing them. Yeah. I mean, they'll bring in wasps. Farmers will sometimes, if they have like an insect issue because the wasp was going to take care of that naturally and you won't have to use, you know, insecticide and stuff like that. No.

And also bees are usually kind of finicky, I saw, as far as what they'll pollinate and what they won't. Wasps are not at all finicky. They'll pollinate whatever. So they're non-selective pollinators, which makes them, like you could use them to pollinate any kind of crop, which makes them pretty helpful. And so they control other crop-destroying insects and they also pollinate crops too. So they are pretty useful.

So that means that you shouldn't just go around killing them. I think we should say it again. No, you shouldn't kill anything except mosquitoes, fleas and ticks. And you also can't say, well, they're a threat to humans because I looked up some stats, Chuck. You ready for this? Yeah. You're not going to get killed from a wasp, are you?

No. I mean, yeah, but no, you're not. So combined, bees, wasps and hornets and hornets are just another type of wasp. Is that so? Yeah. I hadn't heard. They kill about 62 Americans every year from anaphylactic shock, right? Oh, wow.

By contrast, 300 Americans die from falling off of ladders every year. In the UK, get this, between 2006 and 2007, eight people died from bees, wasps or hornet stings. I'm including bees here, by the way. And then in Australia, where you would guess that half the human population is killed off every year by bees and wasps and has to regenerate every spring. Now, between 2000 and 2013, there were only 27 deaths total for that 13 years from bees, wasps and hornets stings, which is pretty astounding.

But it all goes to say, don't listen to the murder hornet rap. The hornets and the wasps aren't out to kill you. They don't want you anywhere near their nests, but they're not trying to wipe out your family. They just want to be left alone, basically. The murder hornet rap. Yeah. Now, here is a hornet, and it's here to say, I come to kill bees. A little fruity pebbles in a major way.

I think, I can't wait to re-listen to this one, because I'm pretty sure you said that they kill 62 million Americans every year. No. I think you did. I might have been hearing things. It might have been a computer glitch. Just 62. Okay.

Six to the two. I really am curious if you said million, so. We'll find out. That'll be an Easter egg for us only. So yeah, don't kill the wasps. If you have what you think is a wasp problem at your house, you really don't, unless it's, you know, I mean, if you have a really big wasp nest, like right above your front door or something, I could see maybe a case being made for removing it, having it professionally

removed. Or if your kids are playing out back and there's a sinkhole from a yellow jacket's underground nest. There's hundreds of yellow jackets. And if you're allergic. How can you see getting that removed, too? But in general, like wasps aren't after you. They don't want anything to do with you.

They're not aggressive toward humans unless you come poking their thing with a stick. I love this, Robert says, and this takes like nerves of steel, and he's like, if one lands on you, don't panic. Avoid swatting it or making swift movements. Just kind of sit there and it'll quickly fly off. Like I don't want to kill a wasp, but if a wasp lands on my arm, I'm not going to be like, all right, little fella, you're just going to give you some time. Go mosey long.

No, I would freak out and flail. I wouldn't swat at it because I feel like I would get stung for sure, but I would definitely do a, you know, ah. Right. You got to try not to do that. You have to listen to Robert and don't panic. Good luck. Every time I see don't panic in the wild, I just assume that it's a reference to the

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, don't you? Yeah, I think so. So there's standing still. That's one thing when one lands on you, okay, that's great. Things you can do to keep them from landing on you though or to not wear white and yellow outdoors. Yeah. Okay.

I don't like white and yellow. Yellow doesn't look good on me anyway, but those colors attract insects. You don't want to wear perfume because you may confuse them into thinking you're a flower. Sure. If you have your garbage can uncovered, don't stand next to it. You want to cover your garbage can. Yeah, especially if you're us. We got a, we got the stink, I always call it the stinkiest garbage can in Atlanta.

I think it's so nasty. It's pretty bad too. It's a lot of years of cat litter. Oh yeah, that's a stink. Dog poop. And then you, oh, you can take down nests yourself if it's below 60 degrees Fahrenheit or 15.5 degrees Celsius because they're probably dead in there anyway. So it's a good time to take it down.

But for the most part, we're just going to go ahead and say, don't take down a wasp nest that you want out of your yard by yourself. Just don't do it. hire a professional. There are people who will take money in exchange for coming to get a nest out of your yard. You can give them money for that and they know what they're doing. So you can feel good about that, about hiring them. And it also supports local business too.

Yeah. And don't get that wasp spray that sprays from like 20 feet away and just go home and like attack these nests with poison. Just don't do it. Stop killing things. What else you got? I got one more thing. You have anything else?

Nope. Okay. So in Japan, it always circles back to Japan, doesn't it, Chuck? If it's quality and good, including their, including the Asian giant wasp as well as yellow jackets and some other types of wasps, Japanese culture or culinary culture loves wasp larva. But to get wasp larva, you have to go out in the wild, find a wasp nest in the summer and then take it back home without getting stung and raise the larva yourself.

And then when they're ready to go, you harvest them and eat them in the fall, which is pretty interesting in and of itself, right? Yes. It gets even more interesting than that because to find a wasp nest in the woods, what they do is they take raw fish, Japanese love raw fish, but they share some of theirs with wasps and they leave it out as bait and then when a wasp shows up, they'll take chopsticks and a little hunk of this fish meat that they have a string tied to and they'll hand it to the wasp and the wasp will fly off with the hunk of fish to take back to its larva,

its eggs, with the string dangling, which makes it easier to follow back to the nest. And after doing this a few times, they're probably successful enough that they track the wasp all the way back. They don't lose it and they find the nest and then that's when they take it home and tend to the larva and then they eat it in the fall. That sounds familiar for some reason, I might have heard that before. Isn't that cool? It's amazing.

Amazing. Well, that's all I've got for wasp, Chuck. Wasp out. So since Chuck said wasp out, that means it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this, Adam, I think you were wrong and Josh was referencing they might be giants. It's a long-winded title. Okay.

Hey guys, in your episode how we almost got rid of polio, you read a listener mail that referred to how flamethrowers work episode, however, I'm somewhat sad that the reference wasn't made for the, they might be giant song, Istanbul, not Constantinople. Josh made the statement and it was a wonderful wasted opportunity. Well, that's exactly what you're talking about, right? Yeah. I said not Constantinople. Yeah.

You were talking about that they might be giant song, right? Yeah. Of course. That doesn't get me. He just didn't say, hey, by the way, that's if they might be giant song. Hey, everybody, open up for the spoon feeding. Just thought I'd drop you both a line. I love the show and enjoy listening to it daily, to and from work, especially the wit and dry

humor. You don't know it goes over your head sometimes. Yeah, right. He said, it's very much my style, so much so that you aren't sure if there was a joke even told. Wow, this is getting very meta. You both make my commute tolerable and enjoyable. Thanks, guys.

That is from Adam P. and Gulfport, Mrs. Sip. Nice. Adam, for you from now on, whenever I make a joke, I'm going to add walka-walka at the end. That'll do. It'll be just for Adam. Thanks a lot, Adam. We appreciate that.

Thank you for listening to us and for lending us rag on you. We do it lovingly and jokingly. We hope you know. Of course. If you want us to rag on you, well, you send us an email and see what you get. Look up and see what you get. You can send it to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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