wasps are going mad

Comment: Jeremy Clarkson:
I have now discovered the highest form of life: wasps

There was much talk in the scientific community last week about the origins and meaning of an interstellar radio message picked up by a telescope in Puerto Rico.
To the untrained ear it sounds like a Clanger talking to the Soup Dragon, but to those who run Seti, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, it could well be “first contact”, the first real evidence that we are not alone in the universe.
The temptation is to reply, but how do we know the message was meant for us? What if it were directed at some other species on Earth? And how would the sender respond if he were to discover that his intergalactic e-mail had been intercepted? I have a horrible feeling that the real recipient may be the wasp, which seems this year to be around in greater numbers than ever. Come on, you must have noticed that since the signal was picked up it has been impossible to go outside without being buzzed.
There’s plenty of evidence that wasps are not of this earth. Unlike any other animal, with the possible exception of the owl and the Australian, they serve no purpose. They’re not in the food chain, they can’t make honey and they’re not fluffy. Nature has a habit of extinguishing its more useless experiments. The dinosaur went west when it grew too big and the dodo when it mislaid its wings. But the pointy yet strangely pointless wasp soldiers on. Why? There’s more, too. Wasps can smell a bowl of sugar from five miles away. How? Sugar does not smell. What’s more, they can organise flight paths from their nests to known sources of food. Again, how, unless they have been trained in the complexities of air traffic control? Here’s another nugget. Wasps are vindictive. Pretty well every creature will attack when it’s hungry or threatened whereas a wasp will attack if you’ve annoyed it in some way. Local councils, which tend to be staffed by animal loving eco- mentalists, are for ever producing leaflets portraying the wasp as a benign part of the British summer — a sort of airborne nettle — forgetting perhaps that each year wasps kill more people than sharks, alligators, lightning, scorpions, jellyfish and spiders combined.
And try this for size. A wasp can lay its eggs inside a caterpillar, knowing that when they hatch, the baby wasps will be able to eat the creature from the inside out. And here’s the really clever bit. Normally, the host’s immune system would destroy the eggs before they had a chance to hatch, so to get round this they are coated with a virus that genetically modifies the caterpillar to ignore the invasion. In other words, a wasp can alter the very being of another creature.
Biologists have examined this virus and found that it exists nowhere else on earth. They’ve also worked out that it’s been around for more than 100m years . . . which is when that strange radio message from the stars was sent.
You may be interested to learn that wasps eat garden furniture. They chew the wood, mixing it with saliva to make paper for their nests. And we think dolphins are intelligent. Furthermore, wasps are pretty much indestructible. I now have an electric tennis racket that turns the art of insect control into a sport. Instead of cat gut, the strings are made from metal strips connected to a powerful battery. One touch will kill anything up to and including a large dog, but wasps? They sit there jiggling around until you take your finger off the power button, whereupon they simply fly away.
Only the other day, after what I have to say was a damn good shot, I cut a German Yellowjacket in half with a carving knife. Such a devastating blow would have killed Flipper instantly, but the wasp? Its head remained alive, its antennae wiggling, perhaps sending messages to outer space pinpointing my position.
We need at this point to examine the mating characteristics of the wasp which are, to say the least, odd. As summer draws to an end the males produce a huge semen duvet in which the queen will hibernate. When she wakes for the spring, she uses the sperm to fertilise her eggs and the cycle is repeated.
This process poses a few questions. How, for instance, does a wasp produce semen? This would involve masturbation and that’s a concept which is difficult to visualise: 10,000 wasps in a nest all taking Captain Picard to warp speed. We know they are making paper for their nests but what else are they using it for? To print some copies of Asian Babe Wasps? “Ooh Adolf. After you with that picture of the Norwegian queen.”
It sounds unlikely. It sounds even more unlikely when you discover that having spent the summer collecting proteins for their young, adult male wasps are free, as autumn approaches, to gorge themselves on rotting apples. This renders them fat, lazy and drunk.
Perhaps this is why the radio message has been received. Perhaps the alien beings that put the wasp on Earth are calling to find out why world domination has not yet been achieved. I doubt they’ll be pleased when they find that their army has been defeated by Granny Smith.