Why Farmers, Scientists, Ecologists Want Us to Rethink Our Fear of Wasps

If you ran a news search on wasps on the internet, chances are that the first entries that pop up would pertain to incidents involving fatalities from wasp bites that were reported from Tamil Nadu . However, only a few hundreds among the one lakh classified species of wasps are known to sting humans. And there’s a lot more to these insects than their nasty temperament. Did you know that wasps are great pollinators? Wasps are a much-misunderstood species of insects, and are interesting to observe (from about 15ft distance), say scientists. “Only the social wasps (which live as communities) such as paper wasps and hornets generally sting humans close to their nests. Wasps are important predators, pollinators and scavengers,” says Aravind Selvam, nature educator at Palluyir, which cond