Everyone loves bees. They are nice, intelligent, capable of communicating with each other. They only sting to defend themselves, as they die after sticking their stinger. They produce honey and pollinate flowers. However, it is difficult to find someone who speaks well of wasps, insects that seem good only to annoy us with their painful stings, without offering anything useful in return. This is not the case – assure the authors of a study just published in the journal Insectes Sociaux – and the blame for the unjustified and widespread antipathy towards them lies with the media, which tends to put these insects in a bad light, recounting their negative sides while keeping quiet about the many, important ecosystem services they offer to our species.
Insects in danger
The research arises from a simple and dramatic observation: many insect populations are in decline, all over the world, due to climate change, pesticides used by man, soil consumption and pollution. In such a scenario, conservation efforts are fundamental to prevent the disappearance of entire insect species from our territories. And as always happens, programs of this type tend to be aimed at animals that are perceived positively by the population. In short, bees and butterflies often have priority over an insect with a bad reputation like the wasp.
A shame, especially since it is – as we said – an unjustified fame. In fact, wasps are essential for controlling the population of many species of insects harmful to agriculture, and since their diet also includes nectar from outside, they take care of pollination like bees. In short, the antipathy towards them is only due to bad publicity. Whose fault is it? This is what the authors of the study, a team of entomologists from University College London, decided to discover.
Blame the media
The study is based on a survey administered to 115 entomologists, 55 of whom specialized in the study of wasps, and 60 experts on bees, who were asked a series of questions aimed at understanding what attitude they believed was prevalent in the media towards the two insects. Among wasp specialists, almost 100% of those interviewed stated that these insects regularly received negative publicity from the media, and that when they were approached by a journalist to comment on news relating to the world of insects, preconceptions always emerged against wasps.
The experience of bee scientists is opposite: according to their answers, bees tend to be shown in a good light in journalistic articles, and there is a positive attitude towards them in the media. Furthermore, all those interviewed believe that the attitude of the media is the reflection (and evidently partly the origin) of that of society more generally: outside the scientific environment, the tendency is to dislike wasps , and sympathy for bees.
“Wasps play an important role in ecosystems around the world, and are particularly useful in agriculture because they pollinate hundreds of plant species and keep harmful insects such as aphids and caterpillars at bay, which can damage crops,” explains Cintia Oi, of the Center for Biodiversity & Environment Research at University College London. “Many people, however, don't realize how useful they are, they only see them as annoying insects that ruin picnics, and the bad publicity that comes from many journalistic articles only reinforces these stereotypes. Wasp researchers may be able to reverse this trend by collaborating with journalists to educate the public on the value of these unfairly frowned upon insects, and in this way, hopefully, conservation programs aimed at the survival of wasps could be supported ”.