Wasps are useful - saving agriculture $417 billion
Created: 08/30/2022, 11:49 am
By: Anna Maureen Bremer
Wasps are more than useful animals.
Many do not even know where the insects perform valuable (!) services.
We clarify.
Your reputation is bad.
Wasps are considered aggressive and annoying and this year the insects seem to be particularly annoying.
Tips to keep wasps away have rarely been so in demand.
Also in demand: home remedies that help with a sting.
But: Wasps are useful too – we overlook it all too often.
echo24.de
reports on how wasps help us and even save billions of dollars in agriculture.
Wasps are useful insects - we just have to look carefully
Even among researchers, an aversion to wasps can be observed.
"For her meta-study, the British entomologist and behavioral ecologist Seirian Sumner combed through research papers from the last 37 years and unpublished lectures from the last 16 years in which bees and wasps were found," writes the
mdr
.
“Even here it became clear: wasps are not exactly popular.
Of 904 publications dealing with pollination and eco-services, 22 papers examined wasps and the remaining 886 papers dealt with bees.”
The usefulness of wasps is dramatically underrepresented.
And where the yellow-black-striped animals do us a great service, we just don't look closely enough.
For example, people often fail to notice that they are eating caterpillars, aphids, leaf beetle larvae or moth larvae.
And that is by far not enough!
Wasps sometimes more effective at pollinating than bees - insects "save" agriculture
Wasps pollinate plants that have no other pollinators.
Or those whose “real” pollinators are no longer there.
The
mdr
report says: “1,500 crops depend on pollination, wasps visit 960 plant species.
According to research, the wasp species
Vespula pennsylvanica
is even more effective at pollinating than bees.” The venom of certain wasp species or the saliva can also contain antibiotic components and they are sometimes used to fight cancer.
Quick help for wasp stings - simple remedies work
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Sumner's meta-study then makes a blatant calculation of the usefulness of wasps: In purely mathematical terms, the wasp saves agriculture worldwide 417 billion US dollars through its diet, which would otherwise be spent on insect control, it is said.
In plain language: some wasp species eat insects that cause damage in agriculture.
Even the thought is prompted that wasps could be used in a targeted manner.
Galileo.tv
is also
working on the battered image of the wasps and emphasizes: “(Hobby) gardeners also get rid of troublemakers in this way.” In addition, wasps have long understood the principle of upcycling: “The animals use empty snail shells as nesting aids.
The barrel-shaped garden wasp creates barrel-shaped brood cells made of clay that are up to one centimeter long.”