The Infinite Monkey Cage - Bees v Wasps

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Brian Cox and Robin Ince tackle one of the most important questions posed by science: which is better, bees or wasps? To defend bees, ecologist Dave Goulson joins the panel, while entomologist Seirian Sumner comes to the defence of wasps. Although both species are known to deliver a nasty sting, Seirian and Dave battle to show why their species should be loved, not swotted, and how we unknowingly rely on them. Comedian Catherine Bohart takes on the role of judge. Which will she ultimately choose: bees or wasps?New episodes are released on Saturdays. If you're in the UK, listen to the full series first on BBC Sounds: bbc.in/3K3JzyF Producer: Caroline Steel Executive Producer: Alexandra Feachem

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. Well, we can all dream, can't we? And I'm Robin Ince. Oh, God! And we can also nightmare as well. Welcome to Infinite Monkey Cage.

And actually, before, there was a lovely thing. I went to a barbecue just after the coronation with a bunch of strangers, and quite often people would come up to me and ask me things about Brian, and this man came up to me and he went, Oh, hello, I've been wanting to talk to you. You're the man that supports that hypnotist. I've had so many people say, oh, you work with that astrologer, right? But the idea that you actually go on television and kind of go, now listen, the universe is 13.7 billion years old, and now eat this onion thinking it's an apple.

Absolutely charming. And that is what you sound like. I was going to say... As this episode of Monkey Cage will be broadcast at the height of the English summer, we'll be addressing the most summery subject we could think of. Waving your hands about wildly and ineffectively as a wasp encircles your cucumber sandwich

before it dies in a melancholy manner in a glass of Pimms. Isn't that a bit evil in war? A little bit, Bennett, too. A touch of both. Anyway, so, actually, because it's Radio 4, that's OK for the Radio 4 version, but we also go out on BBC Sounds, so our producer has written what she considers to be the upbeat youth version of the same line. So after Brian says the most summary subject we could think of,

I have to say, raving to the beats as a wasp encircles your vegan sausage roll and then drowns in your alco-pot. Yeah! Which is apparently how young people speak, according to our producer, who went on the young person's course for BBC Radio. Today we'll be exploring the hidden

worlds of bees and wasps. Their surprising intelligence, intricate social structures and the vital contributions they make to the wider natural world. Joining us we have a professor of bees, a professor of wasps and someone who is neither a professor of bees or wasps. And they are.

Oh, starting with me, sorry. Sorry, just falling asleep, yeah. My name's Dave Goulson. I am based at the University of Sussex, and I spent the last 30 years studying bumblebees, my favourite subject, and my worst sting. Slightly embarrassing backstory to this, but I'll cut to the important bit.

I was in the lab one day, and I managed to suck a bumblebee into my mouth which of course you can hardly blame her stung me on the inside of my bottom lip which immediately ballooned and I spent the rest of the day with my students all ridiculing me and unable to eat anything because I just found it all sort of fell out but anyway I wouldn't recommend it no i really need to know a bit of the backstory whilst doing what okay so there's a little gadget that entomologists use called a pooter they use for sucking up small insects so it consists of a little jar and two tubes going through a bung in the top and you point one of the tubes at a small insect

and you stick the other tube in your mouth and you suck and the little insect flies into the jar that's the idea anyway i needed to move some bumblebees from one place to another and sort them out so i decided to make a giant sized pooter a bumblebee sized pooter the big jam jar and two big tubes you can kind of see where this is going. And it worked. I pointed at a bee, sucked hard, and whoosh, it shot into the jar. So I sucked up a couple more. But of course, I'd forgotten a crucial part of the design, which is that the tube that goes into your mouth

has to have a little bit of netting on the bottom end of it. Otherwise, there's nothing to stop the thing shooting into the jar and then shooting straight up into your lungs or mouth, which is exactly what happened. So it was entirely my own fault. That's a hard act to follow. So I'm Serian Sumner. I am a professor of behavioural ecology at University College London.

And I've spent not quite as long as Dave studying insects, but I study wasps mostly. My sting of stings was in Panama in 2006 and it has stuck in my head because so I used to study these quite big paper wasps they're about two centimeters long big sting so my student was under the house for all the house on stilts and the wasps nest under the house and he was doing his things you know we're painting wasps and taking them off the nests and doing stuff he must have angered the wasps in some way I was standing you know like 10 meters away and the wasps came flying out and he went running off because even when you're a wasp researcher if the wasps come you run and so he came running out and

I thought what's he done this time anyway wasp clearly saw the person running away and thought, I'm not going to chase them. And they saw me standing statically just watching. And it came right up here and it stung me on the eyebrow. And then the next week I looked like some sort of elephant woman. I just had this enormous face. And it's not a good look for someone who studies wasps. Unprofessional. Yeah, really unprofessional.

So that was the sting of stings. I love sting of stings. It sounds like an all wasp remake of the life of Jesus. Hello, I'm Catherine Bohart. I do stand-up comedy. And I suppose the most memorable sting I've ever had, to be honest with you, it happened on my way in here. At the reception here in this building,

they will always take your photo without warning and without even saying smile. And then they hand you the photo. In my case, a sort of shiny potato. And you just have to live with that. And so I'm still smarting. And this is our panel. Right, because it's Wasp versus Bees, we need to find out how much your opinion changes throughout this show. So for the audience that are sat here, we need to find out who's pro-Wasp and who's pro-B. What we're going to do is release some wasps into the audience.

So just first of all, by a cheer, who here is going to vote at this early stage for wasps? I told you it'd be seven. And who here is going to vote for bees? What a mainstream crowd. So there's a lot of work to go on here. We've got an idea. It's just an idea we just came up with.

We thought of an idea where you could talk for maybe 70 seconds without repetition or deviation. It's a copyright issue that we have. And first of all, I'm going to start with you, David, in terms of 70 seconds on bees. There are a brilliant original idea, just a 70 seconds. So for 70 seconds, give your argument for the bee okay they are much cuter than wasps they are furry and colorful and cuddly they are much more useful to us directly

bees are the main pollinators of a huge number of crops about three quarters of the things we eat so things like tomatoes we wouldn't have without bees. But also I love bees because they're really interesting. They're clever. They're the intellectual giants, I would argue, of the insect world. They are capable of amazing feats of communication and navigation and learning. You can even teach bees to play football. And if that isn't enough, then just I'll finish off with the hairy-footed flower bee, which is my favourite bee. They're a solitary bee that flies around our gardens in the spring. And it's called the hairy-footed flower bee because the male has his middle feet

have big tufts of hairs on them. And when they're mating, he gently strokes the face of the female with his hairy feet. Don't try that at home. She seems to really like it how sweet is that bees well so in wasps well i'll just start with the fact that if it hadn't been for wasps there would be no bees bees are simply vegetarian wasps. They are wasps that have forgotten how to hunt, one. There are over 100,000 species of wasps. How many species of bees are there? A mere 22,000. Wasps are diverse by every measure. We have enormous wasps that have 12 centimetre wingspan. They can fly 40 kilometres an hour.

They can turn other insects and arthropods into zombies. They are superb assassins. They are medicine cabinets. Inside their venom, they're able to paralyse insects. They produce antibiotics, antivirals. What else can I say? That's all right i say that's all right i haven't even said the really important thing oh go on then sorry they are nature's pest controllers so you might love bees because they pollinate but wasps pollinate too and on top of that they regulate all

the other insect populations they eat the pesky bees and the pesky flies and the caterpillars and the aphids and the spiders and the cockroaches and everything else that you hate i was very impressed so katherine there you heard the opening arguments you are very much the kind of the vessel of the audience's opinion how do you feel at this current time on what i'm hearing is that bees are creeps and wasps are psychopaths. But I'll remain neutral for now. Dave, actually, Sarian mentioned the idea that wasps predate bees.

So could you speak... It's not an idea, Brian. No ideas, then. You've got to remember, he is a physicist, so everything that's not atoms is, well, it's a story, isn't it? Sorry I mentioned the fact that wasps predate bees. Could you talk about the evolutionary history? Yeah, insects as a whole are incredibly ancient,

go back about 480 million years, so they're amongst the oldest creatures on the planet so that's before there were dinosaurs there were wasps bees came along about 120 million years ago so still quite a while ago but that's why there are fewer bees than there are wasps because the wasps have had longer to speciate and fill all these weird and wonderful niches if you saw a new species of bee or wasp new to science how do you decide whether it's a bee or wasp given that they're so closely related well clearly you invite it to a picnic and say it's annoying if it annoys you or not what's the key okay so so wasps have a wasp waist they have a

constricted wasp waist bees tend to be a bit fatter and they tend to be hairier and also a lot of bees have pollen sacks on their back legs where they carry the pollen and wasps don't have that. So basically bees are wasps, they're a lineage of wasps so perhaps the whole debate is slightly founded on dodgy territory. Don't say it at this early stage. It's interesting though because we tend to think of bees and wasps as different things, so bees are really wasps.

They are a lineage of wasps, essentially. Is the reason wasps are so angry because they're wearing those little corsets? Do you think maybe if they had less thin waist... OK, so wasps are not angry, right? It's the human-wasp interface. I mean... The idea of corsetry, if we could just loosen their corsets,

I could finish my bivy without any kind of interruption, is beautiful. May I challenge the premise? I don't know anybody who thinks of bees as that cuddly. Oh, come on. Which is to say that most people, were there a bee or a wasp near them, are as alarmed by both, no? I disagree. I disagree.

I think there's a certain kind of the bumblish bee that we've been talking about. Say you got scared and you happened to have a rolled-up newspaper nearby. If you killed that bee, you would be wracked with guilt for three or four minutes afterwards. As the wasp would be 12 or 14 seconds. I think that is the latest science.

Yeah. But there is... I think people you know my point is you'd kill both right neither of them are make you feel like oh how sweet it's not like a butterfly that's weird because i do kill butterflies but not one no that's just because we haven't had enough complaints coming in to make it show that we're popular as a show so if i describe myself as a butterfly murderer I would imagine the complaints will just zoom up. Anyway, so... But I think people do think that bees... You know, there's a lot of kind of books about bees,

and we go, oh, bees are wonderful, and I've got this special meadow that I've made for all the bees to make, you know, hackney honey or whatever, and all of these things. You walk into bookshops and you trip over books about bees, mostly written by Dave. For goodness sake, Dave! And then they think you're weird to write a book about wasps.

In terms of behaviour, are wasps aggressive? Well, in the same way that bees will only be aggressive if you fall into their nest or annoy them. You know, bees get annoyed too. Wasps will only chase you or attack you if you in some way threaten them. So mostly they get threatened when you fall into their nest, for example, and then who can blame them? They've had this enormous mammal fall into their nest and they have evolved to respond to defend their nest against mammals

because their main predators are mammals like badgers. Badgers kind of like go straight into the hole of the nest and they're flailing their arms around and they're breathing heavily. This is sounding a little bit like your picnic or your barbecue. That's exactly what we do. We bat our arms around going, go away wasp, and we're shouting at it. So we are behaving like a badger. So it's only when we behave like badgers that wasps actually attack us.

Now I know why I was stung in that open-air production of Wind in the Willows. So really, so the advice would be, so if you don't, we're all used to it when a wasp comes and there's a picnic and you thrash around. So essentially, if you stay still, then they're not going to come and sting you. Close your mouth. Close your mouth. Dave. Dave. That's why he doesn't work on wasps can we talk

about the life cycle so the common one is the yellow jacket the one that we're used to when in summer when we're having picnics and so at the moment are we allowed to say that it's may we're allowed to say it's may the bbc has now reached the point i'm afraid that using that particular calendar may well alienate some of the audience. So we will not be specific and use the whole 12-month calendar. I mean that you're not going to air this in May, so is it OK to say...

But some people here will repeat in one May or another. OK, I'll start again. It's May. OK, so about the time when the sun starts showing its cheery head, you'll start to see... May. There's a short way of saying that. May. Have they come up with a word for that time?

What is that? In the early spring. Hang on, May's late spring. I'm going back in time. In early spring, the queens that have been hibernating in your attic come out. What? Don't say that. Well, they might be. They might not be.

What? You might be all right. Don't worry. But actually, you should be happy that they might be hibernating in your attic. Should I be happy? Yeah, because it's a sign that you are going to have a lovely population of pest controllers in your garden. I don't have a garden, I just have an attic.

Now, a new nightmare. A garden. Stand-up comedy, I said. Shall I get back to the life cycle, please? In early spring... Early spring, queens come out of hibernation. They found a nest on their own. So at the time of year, which is known as May,

they tend to build a nest on their own, and I happen to have one in my garden shed. So they build a lovely little nest. They're lone foundress, they're a single mum. They go out, they find their wood, chew up a bit of bark, make it into a beautiful paper nest, little fist-sized, lay the eggs, feed them. So they go out hunting. And then after about a few weeks, so about a month, then the brood will emerge as the workers. And there'll be a few workers. And once that's happened, the queen will stay at home and she won't leave the nest again. She basically becomes an egg-laying machine.

The workers go out and do the work. By the way, all the workers are always female, both in bees and wasps and ants. The males are simply flying sperm and they come at the end of the colony cycle. So it's the same as with humans. We get it.

We just can't fly. Only half the room likes that. you can't even fly you're right are they clones are they clones the workers no no they are actually in the case of the yellow jacket they are a mixture of full and half sisters because their mum will mate with about seven different males she would have done that the previous autumn. So the sisters are closely related, but unlikely to be full sisters. But they are sterile.

They're unable to mate themselves. So they are committed to being a worker, and they cannot leave the nest and start up their own colony as a queen. So they mate in the autumn, and then the queen hybrids. Yeah. So over the summer, lots of workers are produced. The colony grows exponentially, and all those workers are your pest controllers in your garden. They're foraging away. They're eating your caterpillars and your cabbages and your aphids on your tomato plants, doing a great job. And then it gets to about August and then you discover the nest.

And by this time, it's maybe got 10,000 workers. But until that point, you'd not realised it was there. And you'd lived quite happily alongside those wasps, no problems. And then suddenly, as soon as you discover that nest, you decide that it has to go. And so you call up the pest control and you kill it. If you don't do that, and you allow it to live until the end of its colony cycle, in late September, the sexuals will emerge, next year's queens and the males. And they go off and have a mating flight. And the males mate, die, and the females are mated and they go into hibernation.

And the rest of the colony will completely die. So if you've got a nest in your attic or shed from a previous year, it's not like honeybees. They won't be there year after year. The whole colony will die at the end of the summer. So we really should, if you find a colony in August, September, you should leave it? You've only got to tolerate them another few weeks. And the point is that you have lived with that wasp nest for months, and you've not noticed them.

So they are nature's pest controllers. They're there for a reason. They're a top predator. Well, Catherine, we found those butterfly killers we were looking for. Not just butterflies, little baby butterflies. What a sales pitch. There's some top predators and they won't even pay rent. It's like, ooh!

No, I'm more endeared. I like the idea of working sisters. That's quite fun. Although the sterility's a little intense. But are bees any better? Actually, really similar in many ways. So bumblebees have more or less the same annual life cycle as the queen starts a nest on their own in the spring honeybees are interestingly different because they're the queens live for many years and the colony survives

the winter and that's why they make honey because there aren't any flowers in the winter so they'd all starve to death so they they make kilos and kilos of honey at the end of the summer so that they can all sit tight in their nest through the winter and they've got something to eat. The more interesting difference is when it comes to the sex, but we can come back to that if you've got something more pressing. That sounded a bit creepier. I mean, I was going to talk about sex,

but if there's something more pressing than that... It's quite the gauntlet. It's like, you got something sexier than sex, Catherine? No, I was just going to ask if there's a Republican option, but no, please, let's talk about the sex in the monarchy. It's just quite weird. So the bumblebees are less exciting. So they, the young queens, they just mate with one male,

and he squirts in this kind of sticky gloop so that she can't mate again, called a mating plug. You've got to be very quiet, because this show goes out at 7.30pm. Honeybees have a completely different system, where the queen, the young queen who hasn't mated, she goes on what's called a nuptial flight, and she flies around, releasing a pheromone that attracts the drones, the males.

And they mate in mid-air, so the males will jostle for position around her and the first one will grab hold of her and mate with her. And they have this bizarre explosive mechanism that blasts sperm into the queen. And it ruptures the male's genitalia and they fall off and he then falls to the ground dead. You can actually hear the explosion it's like a little clap they don't do it very privately they're doing it flying anyway and then the next male jumps on and he has to

pull away the bits of the previous males and then he explodes and for and that goes on and on until about 20 of them are lying dead on the ground. And then she decides she's had enough, and that's it for her mating for life. You'd think there probably would be enough. And she stores that sperm. There's something like 1.7 million sperm she stores enough

to basically produce 2,000 babies a day for the next seven years who would name that a nuptial flight there's no romance to it at all dave well maybe from a bees perspective there is you know i guess they have a different idea of romance to us in terms of because you were talking recently about being endeared how further endeared do you feel now having heard that story because in some ways it's a pretty good feminist story, isn't it? I mean, the explosion... You got feminism from a bunch of men jostling to explode sperm into the girl? They, they themselves...

Her first and only time having sex, I might add. They're sacrificing their lives for the cause. Sacrificing their lives. They deserve to die after that. Isn't that the perfect ending? Look what I'm doing. Oh, no, my genitals have exploded. That definitely won't make the same thing. Notwithstanding what you've just said,

you also mentioned that bees are the most intelligent of all insects. It doesn't sound like it. Yeah, does B19 not pick up on the vibe? I guess their hormones get the better of them. Yeah. How intelligent are they? So what do we know about bee intelligence? We know they can learn.

They're really good at learning which flowers are most rewarding. They have to be. Actually, what first got me hooked on studying bees all those years ago was I noticed I was sitting in a park and there was a patch of flowers and there were bees flying around, and I noticed that they sitting in a park and there was a patch of flowers and there were bees flying around and I noticed that they often fly up to a flower and at the last second they veer off as if there's something wrong with it.

They might do that two or three times before they land on a flower and drink the nectar. I thought that was a bit odd and I didn't know why they did it and I ended up spending five years and it turns out, it sounds odd doesn't it, it turns out that as they approach a flower,

they sniff it for the smelly footprint of a recent bee visitor. If a bee's recently landed on the flower, she will have taken the nectar, so it'll be empty, so there's no point. And every time a bee lands on a petal, she doesn't do this deliberately, she accidentally leaves a little smear of oils on the petal, just like we do. I don't know why I'm miming, This is a radio show, isn't it? But I'm holding a glass in my hand, and when you put it down, you leave a smear of oils on it.

It's exactly the same thing. So the bees are using the smelly footprint of other bees as a cue that that flower's less rewarding. And it's just one example of many cool things they do. Probably the most famous is the waggle dance, which is a honeybee thing, which is kind of unique in that they can basically communicate with each other. And a worker bee, when she's found a good patch of flowers,

comes back to the hive. And she can tell all the other bees exactly which way to go, in what direction, and how far they have to go before they'll find this patch of flowers. And they do this with a dance in complete darkness inside the hive. Essentially, they buzz and run in a straight line and then they loop back and run exactly the same line again and they loop back each loop being in the opposite direction so it traces out a kind of figure of eight strangely but the essential part is the straight line run they do the length of the run

is proportional to the distance in kilometers that she's telling other bees to go. And the angle of her run on the vertical comb in the dark is the angle from the sun that she wants the other workers to go. And she carries on doing this dance for several hours during which the sun moves. But even though she can't see it, she knows that and she adjusts the angle of her run so that she's still accurately sending her fellow workers to the right place. And it's just extraordinary. It's hard to believe that a little insect with a brain

smaller than a grain of rice could do that. They can even recognise human faces. He can teach them or they can learn which faces will give them a sugar reward so they can tell them apart. Osps can do that too they're both great contrasting so i mean i know it's incredibly difficult i suppose question but in terms of cognitive ability are they on a similar level so my favorite So my favourite first experiment that I read about is by Sir John Lubbock in the 1800s, who of course was Darwin's neighbour.

And he did this fabulous experiment, which he describes in great detail, where he has a bottle and he puts a bee in the bottle and he holds the bottle so that the opening is facing away from the window but the bottle tops off so the bee can escape if it's clever enough but the bee isn't clever enough it just keeps going towards the bottom of the bottle and banging its head against this bottom of the bottle that's a bit stupid it does the same experiment with a wasp and the wasp doesn't mess around straight away. She's out the right end. She's out the proper exit. So I think that sums it up. Don't you think, Dave? I must admit bees haven't got the hang of glass. It's

true. One day they get stuck in conservatories all the time. It makes me so sad that my conservatory is usually full of a pile of dead bees. I endlessly shoo them out. What's it like having a conservatory? Sounds nice. Here's my question. If they are so individualistic, is there ever social discord? There's all sorts of social discord, yeah. And actually, people used to kind of idealise social insects as having this kind of utopian society where they all work together for the common good, but actually it's far from it. Bumblebees in particular, they seem cute and sweet, but they're not always. When it comes to producing males at the end of the summer, the workers would actually rather produce their own sons rather than rear brothers

for slightly complicated reasons. Basically, worker bees who've never mated can still lay eggs that will hatch, but only into sons, which means that the queen who has mated, she can decide when she lays an egg whether it's going to be male or female by allowing it to be fertilised with that big store of sperm she gathered the previous summer. If she allows the egg to be fertilised, it'll be a daughter. So most of the year she produces daughter workers. Smart woman.

But when it gets to the end of the year and they know they've got to produce some drones, so then she starts laying some unfertilised eggs. But her workers would rather lay their own son eggs. And if the queen in the bumblebee nest spots one of her daughters laying eggs, which are her grandsons. She eats them, so she's eating her grandchildren.

But then the daughters will fight back, and there's lots of them. And often they end up killing the queen. Regicide, or matricide. Or democracy. I don't know. You mentioned some of the more unusual wasps. It might be nice to discuss some of the stranger life cycles of wasps rather than the more common ones that we're used to. OK, so my gateway wasp,

which I do recommend to anyone who's thinking of getting into the wasp world... We're going to move on to much harder wasps, so be careful. ..are the hover wasps of Southeast Asia, and they're just beautiful. Their stings are described as a fragrant tickle are the hover wasps of Southeast Asia, and they're just beautiful. Their stings are described as a fragrant tickle, because there's this guy who's stung himself lots of times by lots of different insects and describes their stings and how painful they are. These are like the number one on the scale, the least painful.

And they live in small groups of about five or six individuals, and there will be a queen, and the rest of them will be her daughters, just like dave described but all of these daughters are capable of mating and setting up their own house and yet they stay at home and they look after their mother's brood their siblings and so it's a lovely society where they have made the decision to stay at home and help rather than leave home and rear their own brood that sounds like a guilt tripping mother well you're more than capable of going out and setting up your own home if you want but me and your sisters are all going to stay here

if you want to leave your poor mother alone do it'll sting but i'll understand well you're absolutely right it is a soap opera it is a soap opera and when the queen dies basically all of her daughters are a queue they're like ladies in waiting it's terribly polite and they basically queue for the chance to be the queen so when the queen eventually dies or is rudely removed by the experimenter then the highest rank worker which is always without fail the oldest worker will calmly step into her shoes and become the new queen and then everyone moves up one in the hierarchy it's it's so beautifully perfect it's boring like the civil service it's like the civil service yeah you've been here longer so you get promoted no offense to the civil service actually i like to

describe these bosses like the insect version of meerkats, which I hope makes people feel a bit more empathic towards them, because they are just like the same kind of group dynamics that go on in meerkat societies. They are found in these simple societies of these wasps. That is a brilliant trick at the end. So near the final audience vote, suddenly go, a little bit like meerkats, which you all love, don't you?

You mentioned a couple of gruesome stories. vote suddenly go a little bit like meerkats which you will love don't you what's the you mentioned a couple of gruesome stories what is the most gruesome behavior in a wasp so i guess the most famous gruesome behavior so the zombie wasp everybody loves the zombie wasps it's the emerald jewel wasp she's very beautiful she's very glossy she's kind of iridescent. She's also quite small. She is a stinging wasp and she's solitary. She lives on her own. So she hunts cockroaches. Cockroaches tend to be quite big. She's got the problem that she's got to find the cockroach. That's the easy bit. The second problem is she's got to paralyse the cockroach. Well, that's kind of all right. She can do that. The third problem is she's got to get the cockroach to the burrow that she's prepared, her nest.

And the cockroach is very big. So her solution, well, evolution has provided her with a solution, is this. She has two very precise stings. So one is in the thorax, which is the main body of the cockroach, which stops it squirming around, such that it's still enough that she can then inject right into its brain with a neurotoxin which renders the cockroach still able to walk but has no will and so then what she does is she grabs it by i'm not actually this isn't gonna this isn't gonna be very good for the wasp what do you mean it's so cute she grabs the's a meerkat. It's a meerkat without any will.

She grabs the semi-paralyzed cockroach by its antenna, and she walks it like a poodle to its underground tomb. And it buries itself, basically, in the tomb. And then she lays her egg on it and seals it up. And then that cockroach is paralyzed, but remains a beautifully fresh living larder because it's still alive and also the wasp has put all these sort of antibiotics antibacterial stuff in with it as well and then the egg hatches into the larvae and you know the story the larvae eats the cockroach from the inside well carries on eating it and it's a beautiful story uh everybody

loves the zombie yeah yeah go zombie wasp just Just to be fair. Sorry, there's an even better one though. There is this wasp. It's a spider hunting wasp. It doesn't build a nest, so it's quite unusual for a hunting wasp, solitary hunting wasp. It lays its egg on this spider called homonotus and the spider is

oblivious and it goes about its business with this wasp egg on its bottom and then the egg hatches into a larva and proceeds to eat the spider from the rear forwards only eating the bits that are just not necessary so the bits of chitin and bits of fat and bits of muscle and meanwhile the spider is carrying on its daily business oblivious to the fact that its derriere is being nibbled up by a wasp larva and it carries on eating until it's big enough to pupate. And only at that point, so the last things it eats are the vital organs.

And at that point, when it's ready to pupate, the spider finally keels over and dies. And all that's left of it are its mandibles. Now, Dave. Yes, just to be fair, I want the most gruesome bee, other than the exploding genitals, which we've had. Wasps definitely have it when it comes to most gruesome, but bees do some things that are fairly unpleasant.

Probably the best I can think of are the cuckoo bees. So some bees have, just like cuckoos, given up bothering to make their own nests. They sneak into the nests of other species of bee wait till the adults are away and lay their own eggs which hatch really quickly and the little cuckoo larvae have huge jaws which they have just for the first instar of their life for murdering the host's offspring so they crawl around kill all the host's offspring and then eat all their food which seems a little harsh but they're yeah

fascinating all part of life's rich tapestry I guess. So Catherine now before we go out to the audience as the barometer of public taste where are you now on bees versus wasps? Horrified. I'm traumatized look I want to like an under, but as has been made clear multiple times, they are the top predator. And so I don't feel as sorry for wasps as the PR machine might have led me to. That was disgusting, truly scary, and I don't want any part of it. So you can keep your butterfly killing horror show. I'm sticking with the bees. Right, well, let's find out what the audience thinks.

So those who'd like to vote for bees... CHEERING Those who'd like to vote for wasps... CHEERING Oh, I think the wasps have it. And that is the psychopath test, as far as I'm concerned. I completely agree with you. I think, yeah, the wasps redeemed themselves. I'm fascinated by both. I mean, that's the wonderful thing,

isn't it? They are wonderfully interesting, complex animals. They do definitely need a PR makeover and we need to so move beyond the picnic wasp. I didn't tell you how to deal with the picnic wasp. Can I just end with that? Yeah. So if a wasp does come to your picnic, which it will do in the summer, depending on whether it's early or late summer, it will be wanting different things. Now, if it's early summer, then probably it will be going for protein. So it might go for your ham or your sausage or your chicken sandwich. So if she arrives and she wants some of your chicken sandwich, then my top tip to you is let her have some.

Give her a wasp offering. She'll take a bit of your chicken back to the brood and then she'll come back again for some more you can set aside a tiny bit of your sandwich for her and just gradually move it away from you as she comes and goes and using the landmarks that dave spoke about previously the wasp will come flying zigzagging back in front of you she's not coming to you. She's simply using you as a landmark to find out where that chicken sandwich has gone. So that's what happens early in the summer. And then late in the summer, she'll be looking for sugar.

And that's when she goes for your beer and your Prosecco and your lemonade and your jam. So it's the larvae that are the carnivores, the actual adult wasps themselves, the vegetarians. And so during the main part of the summer, they're hunting protein to feed to the brood. But at the end of the summer, the larvae have pupated and pupae don't need feeding. And so you've basically got nests full of furloughed wasps who don't need to hunt anymore, but they still need to get sugar to keep their own personal nutrition. And normally they go to

flowers to get nectar, just like bees do. But actually your jam or your beer is also quite an attractive option. So ham to jam, give them an offering and you're sorted. It's like treat a wasp like your girlfriend on her period. If she wants to eat it, just let her have it. And step slowly away from the chicken sandwich. And then she won't bother you. The one thing we've run out of time, but I just wanted you to mention, David,

I read in the notes that bees are just terrible flyers, which is a ridiculous thing to contemplate. Obviously, there's this sort of myth that bumblebees shouldn't be able to fly according to the calculations of some physicist, which I don't think actually any physicist ever did calculate. But they're not very aerodynamic. You look at a bumblebee this big round heavy thing with tiny little wings and they do have to beat them really fast to stay in the air that's part of the secret

of it and there's some complex physics about creating little vortices with the tips of their wings and they make a kind of figure of eight motion but however it does work clearly because they do fly but it is energetically really expensive for them so there's this slightly crazy calculation that a running man will burn the calories in a mars bar in about an hour of running which is quite depressing if you're running to lose weight but if you had a man-sized bumblebee it would burn the calories in the mars bar in 30 seconds of flying so So their whole life, he's lived on a kind of knife edge between, you know, being full and being starving. So a bumblebee

with a full stomach is about 40 minutes from starvation. If she runs out of energy, she can't find enough flowers. Then she's reduced to walking and then she's in big trouble because you can't get to flowers if you're on foot. And you do find, particularly in the early spring, you'll see sometimes bees wandering along a footpath or whatever and it's basically usually because they've run out of energy that wouldn't have been such a good advertising jingle though would it a mars every 40 minutes helps you work then you need another one very very soon you're gonna die um it's brilliant advertising okay i am available uh um what i think is very interesting as well is that how

knowledge changes your attitude to things because i have to say from when i read sarian's book about wasp it really changed my attitude to wasp because it gave me more information when something's just an erratic thing that you know nothing about but even just by the knowledge of it i think it changes how you experience something anyway so i hope that at the end of this show you're all a little bit less scared of wasps than you were, or alternatively, that you're suddenly much more scared of meerkats than you used to be. It could go either way.

Now, did we ask the audience a question, Brian? Yes. The audience's question was, what creature are you most irrationally scared of, and why? And Richard said, spider, because I hit one with a newspaper, and it ran under the bed but like elephants spiders never forget it's now been 20 years and I'm still living in fear waiting for its return what have you got Catherine Bruce says my mother-in-law and it's not irrational

I've never met the woman. I don't want to besmirch her good name, Bruce. They can't all be bad, mother-in-law, can they? Mine's very nice. You have to say that, Robin. No, I don't. She's really good. I'll tell you what, her melanzana parmigiana, apart from anything else, would win me over.

Hope you're listening, Susan. Timothy said, my partner is a vet, and much like a patient, I'm irrationally afraid of her. Have you got another one, Catherine? Sam says, flying fish, because wings can only get wetter. In case you don't know, Catherine, because I know you're the youngest on the panel, a long time ago, Brian was in a pop band. Thank you so much to our panel,

Sari-Ann Sumner, David Goulson and Catherine Bohart. And next week, we are going foraging. What for? We are going foraging for magic. Ooh. You are going for that youth audience, aren't you? Magic. It says mushrooms here in the script.

No. Just magic. The magic that lives in the forest. You've been researching? I have tried a little bit of next week's show, and all I'm saying is I saw a little elf wearing slippers made of gold. Next week we'll be exploring the magic of mushrooms. Maybe Robin will be back with us by then.

Goodbye. There was a little goblin as well. Goodnight. Goodnight. Thank you. What could be more modern than a net zero travel show? A show about going places that never goes anywhere. Welcome then to Your Place or Mine on BBC Radio 4. I'm Sean Keaveney and I love travelling almost as much as I love staying at home and watching music documentaries. I figure Massachusetts, you know, for somebody like you who doesn't particularly enjoy broadening their horizons, it would be sort of a baby step because Massachusetts is kind of the heart of New England. So, you know, it wouldn't be too shocking for you. Each week, another

fantastic and intrepid guest attempts to lull me out of my postcode with persuasion alone. Eat the insects too. I mean, that's what they do a lot in Oaxaca. They normally roast them and then you can scatter them on your guacamole. There's something deliciously kind of earthy and umami about insects. Anybody who's been on the back of my Uncle Paul's motorbike has eaten a lot of insects, you know, because he goes very fast.

Your place or mine. With me, Sean Keaveney. Listen and subscribe on BBC Sounds. Conditions apply.