BLOG: Is it possible for people to like – or even love - wasps?

They are the spoilsports of the summer.

Like the bully who comes over to kick down your sandcastle or the seagull who swoops down to steal your chips, wasps have the incredible ability to ruin an otherwise pleasant summer experience, writes Simon Burch.

And this year, so we’re told, they’re out in force. The exceptionally warm weather we’ve all been enjoying for so long has, it transpires, a dark side, in that it has created the perfect breeding season for wasps.

And now they’re hatched, in bigger numbers than before, and coming to a picnic near you. Or, as is most likely, your actual picnic.

Call me obsessed with my work, but I do wonder how easy it would be to do the PR for wasps. If the marketing director of Wasps Inc was to ring up Penguin PR and say “Simon, help us, we have an image problem and it’s affecting our sales,” I’d hesitate before taking the gig.

Because take a straw poll of literally everyone you know and I’d bet that nobody would have a good word to say about wasps.

Bees, fine. Everyone likes bees, because they make honey, they’re fluffy and we know that when they sting us, they die.

This means that we can be like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry and (non-communicatively) ask them if they feel lucky, punk – because them stinging us has a worse outcome for them than it does for us.

Just knowing that it’s the bee’s life that’s on the line and they're having to grapple with the bigger dilemma offers us huge comfort in a Human vs Bee encounter and means we don’t take them quite so seriously.

We might also feel quite sorry for them, in a way.

Wasps don’t have the jeopardy. They can sting us with impunity and this means they wield incredible power, the kind of power that can break up a family barbecue and cause grown men to flee from pub tables while holding their pints with the other hand covering the top.

And don’t mention the panic that a single wasp can wreak at a children’s birthday party.

I got stung by a wasp a couple of weeks ago. I was having a lovely afternoon enjoying the sun and sipping a beer when all of a sudden I got a lancing pain through my top lip.

Knowing I’d been stung by a wasp that had crept into me beer bottle unseen, I spat out my drink immediately and gingerly inspected my top lip, which was starting to swell up in size.

After momentarily considering launching a new career as an Instagram influencer, my thoughts turned to my assailant.

Typical of the breed, it had snuck away like some kind of airborne assassin, melting into the warm afternoon, probably chuckling to itself in a dastardly fashion as my friends were handing me ice cubes to soothe the pain.

So I have personal beef with wasps. And when you look further into their back story, there is very little to recommend them.

Take the Cotesia species of wasp. They lay their eggs inside caterpillars, so that their larvae, after they hatch, eat their host from the inside, feeding carefully so that the caterpillar stays alive as long as possible.

Or there’s the Emerald Cockroach wasp, which also has the same trick – albeit it stings the cockroach twice first, one to paralyse its front legs and then a sting to the brain to disable the cockroach’s escape reflex.

Once that’s done, it grabs its antenna and pulls it like a dog on a lead to a burrow, where it lays an egg inside it, seals up and the burrow and... well, you know the rest.

By now my call to the marketing director at Wasp Inc is not going well, but then I decide to ask about some questions about our own, more familiar wasp – the yellow jacket, or vespula vulgaris – and things take an upward turn.

Because, it turns out, there is a huge amount of information about the humble, if annoying and threatening, yellow jacket, that actually makes it, maybe not likeable, but admirable.

It turns out these common-or-garden wasps are smart and useful. They can recognise each other’s faces. They can communicate with one another. They clear up dead organic matter. And they help gardeners to keep a lid on bugs.

But get this. Because all the wasps we see, and will see for the rest of the summer, are female.

Yep, that’s right, girls, they’re girls.

Naturally, there has to be instant respect for any female who has the self-confidence to make such a bold fashion statement as wearing horizontal stripes while out in public.

And unlike Kim Kardashian, wasps don’t need surgery or a corset to be able to rock a wasp-waist. Their hourglass figures are as natural as natural can be.

But, as anyone who works in PR knows, it’s when you make someone or something relatable to your target audience that you start to turn the tide of public opinion and get the people onside.

And so it is with wasps, whose existence, when you consider their backstory and lifestyle, echoes that of other females across the whole of nature's spectrum in that they do the majority of the work and the bloke wasps don’t really do anything.

You see, that wasp you see divebombing your slice of cake or terrifying your toddler is nothing more than a lady wasp working her way through a huge to-do list.

Chances are, earlier that day she will have chewed up some wood in order to help build the nest and then done a load of pollinating. She will have been out collecting protein (insects, carrion and your chips) to feed the larvae, grabbing a snack of nectar for herself on the go, and then returned to the nest to hand over the goodies to the kids.

And when you swipe angrily at her with your arm, or attempt to squish her with a rolled-up newspaper?

Well, then she’ll leap into action to protect herself and her nest and, even in death, she will emit a pheromone telling her friends that their lives are in danger.

And the male wasps? Well, they don’t hatch until late summer, at which time they’ll fly off, mate with a virgin queen from another colony and then die.

Like female lions, female wasps are exemplars of animals working together to create successful societies. They are providers, they care for each other and others in their team, they look after each other and are willing to sacrifice themselves for their cause.

I say female lions, when I mean lionesses. Or should I say Lionesses. Because it’s highly appropriate that this summer, the wasps will be picking up the baton from the triumphant England women’s football team by showing the same togetherness, hard work, bravery and self-sacrifice that they showed to win the Euros.

So the next time a load of wasps swoop in when you’re enjoying some al fresco dining, you will no longer get cross, or anxious. Instead, let the song Here Come the Girls pop into your head as you watch them go about their business.

You might still be wary, but you’ll be less revolted – and you might even start to like them after all.