WASPS: luckless fly falls foul of a striped killer

WASPS are best known for their painful stings but if you ever see one dismember a fly you quickly realise their jaws are equally formidable.

I watched closely as this became the fate of an irritating blue-bottle which had buzzed around our house for hours.

I had finally cornered the blue-bottle myself and, after a few mad flicks with a tea towel, managed to stun it and render it flightless.

For some reason I did not kill it outright while it was at my mercy.

Instead, I picked it up and lobbed it out onto the patio where it began tottering around on the sun-baked flagstones.

By sheer chance, I glanced out at my former tormentor some minutes later and saw the 'coup de grace' had actually been delivered by a wasp.

Not only that, but the wasp was now slicing the blue-bottle into pieces using its mighty mandibles.

For the next few minutes I observed the wasp flying away with carefully packaged pieces of bluebottle meat and then returning.

It repeated the process until the whole corpse was gone.

It was not hard to imagine where the blue-bottle ended up.

Wasps feed their larvae on insects so the grounded blue-bottle's fate was sealed as soon as it attracted the attention of its executioner.

Our Common and German wasps are so alike as to be almost one species. Both are widespread, about 18 millimetres long, with the distinctive black and yellow markings of typical wasps.

Both build grey, papery nests for their young and both sting. (I've written here before about being badly stung by wasps as a child after my brother wilfully enraged a nest).

Despite their similarities, there is a quick way to tell which wasp is which. If you can get close enough to see, the German wasp's face carries three distinct black dots while the Common wasp's sports a kind of anchor shape. Hornets, of course, are also wasps but are easily identified.

They are much bigger than either of the above pair at 30 millimetres in length, with distinctive tawny brown and dull yellow colouring.

Wasps have a reputation for being among the most powerful species in the insect world.

This was even alluded to in 18th century poet Jonathan Swift's attack on legal injustice:"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through."

I prefer to leave nature alone when I can.

However, when our two young children were stung recently, I knew action was needed regarding a wasps' nest in our front garden.

A neighbour kindly lent me an anti-wasp spray and this was duly used to douse the nest at night.

However, torrential rain seemed to wash the poisonous white dust away and many wasps survived.

It was only after the same neighbour emptied the entire spray into the nest and blocked off the exit that these tough insects finally succumbed. Nervous blue-bottles in the garden must have cheered.