🐝Why (environmental) lawyers should love wasps 🐝

By Catríona Campbell, LVF Stewardship Committee Member

LVF’s inaugural book club

For LVF’s inaugural book club in September, we explored books centred on insects, a group often overlooked despite their crucial role in maintaining ecosystems and their growing vulnerability to climate change (the list of books is here, and you can find details of our next book club on ‘Rivers’ here).

Between us, we’d chosen to read two non fiction (Silent Earth – Averting the insect apocalypse by Dave Goulson and Hidden World: how insects sustain life on earth by George McGavin) and one fiction book (The Bees by Lalline Paul).

We had a great discussion during our book club meet up which covered many topics, including: 

• reasons not to kill ants; 
• volunteering with nature and taking part in insect surveys, and how this makes us more appreciative of different species; and 
•  the power of scientific facts vs emotive storytelling.

We also talked about the importance of wasps for pest control, and how these insects have a bad rep compared to bees – including in The Bees…

Wasp exhibition and talk

Cue the ‘World of Wasps’ exhibition at the lovely UCL Grant Museum of Zoology! This exhibition (finishing on 24 January), is based on UCL research and features imaging, projections, commissioned artwork by Peter Ayres, and virtual reality to reveal the unseen lives of wasps – covering their homes, their lifestyles and their relationships. The exhibition includes wasps and wasp nests collected by Prof Seirian Sumner – whose mission is to dispel myths about wasps, and make people love them. 

For LVF’s most recent Community event, on 7 October we headed to a ‘late’ of this exhibition which featured talks by Professor Sumner and her team, and the chance to make some paper wasps to stick to the artist’s wasp nest. Professor Sumner’s talk was fascinating and she outlined seven key reasons we should love wasps, of which there are over 100,000 species. The seven reasons we should love wasps are:

Pollinators, pest control and paper

Given LVF’s interest on the climate and nature crises, we were particularly fascinated to hear about their roles as pollinators and pest controllers – everyone knows that bees have these functions, but now we know that wasps do too.

For example, we heard how wasps are being used as effective ‘nature-based solutions’ for pest control on massive agricultural fields in Brazil. Wasps can also become accidental pollinators by travelling from plant to plant carrying pollen.

And as lawyers it was very interesting to learn that we may have paper because of wasps – its inventor is rumoured to have been inspired by watching paper wasps make their nest. Also, the Magna Carta was written using ink made from growths on oak trees caused by parasitic wasps. So lawyers may not exist without wasps!

Artist workshop

Very in keeping with LVF’s creative interests, the evening included a workshop with the artist Peter Ayres who designed parts of the exhibition – the paper wasps’ nests pictured below. We were given the opportunity to make these gorgeous paper wasps which were then stuck onto the paper nest in the exhibition (full disclosure – our wasps didn’t look as good as this one!).