Wasps

[Chris Luck]

Actually I doubt that you do understand my sentiments Karol, I'm interested in all life and not ending up with an impoverished "safe" world made up of theme parks with fizzy, not good for your health, drinks and junk food.

Chris

 

[TryingToLetThemBee]

Actually I doubt that you do understand my sentiments Karol, I'm interested in all life and not ending up with an impoverished "safe" world made up of theme parks with fizzy, not good for your health, drinks and junk food.

Chris

That's a bit harsh, IMHO. I can imagine parks are a magnet and a haven and so not nationally representative, but a casualty rate like that needs managing. These are dangerous creatures. That does not mean exterminating them, but management is needed.

 

[mbc]

Actually I doubt that you do understand my sentiments Karol, I'm interested in all life and not ending up with an impoverished "safe" world made up of theme parks with fizzy, not good for your health, drinks and junk food.

Chris

Lol, but wasp stings are serious and the great unwashed deserve the protection of wasp trap salesmen altruistically highlighting the dangers and offering cost effective solutions to theme parks where masses of fat kids(and adults) drink pop.

 

[ichbinpaul]

I have never slaughtered more jaspers than I have so far this year, and still they do not seem to thin out, today I got a mamoth Queen about 100yrds from the apiary and was feeling happy to have stopped a generation but then I was visited upon by the rest of her family I presumed, anyway I had to yeald and go home the tide of the battle had turned, I bet they are there tomorrow waiting!.

 

[AdrianSmith]

That's a bit harsh, IMHO. I can imagine parks are a magnet and a haven and so not nationally representative, but a casualty rate like that needs managing. These are dangerous creatures. That does not mean exterminating them, but management is needed.

I agree with Chris fwiw, but dangerous is a subjective term, and parks would need to manage them anyway, just like they have to manage nettles. People go to the first aid huts because stings hurt and they think putting something on the sting will help, or at least stop the child crying.

The Hansard figures Karol mentioned are here http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2006-07-13b.71618.h
They include bee stings.
I look at them and think "hmm, 16 deaths in 5 years. I have a bicycyle (100+ deaths a year). I used to do a lot of scuba diving (20+ deaths a year around our shores)".

I did try and find out about Kounis Syndrome the last time it was raised, but wished I hadn't, and hoped it wouldn't come up again. I found case studies relating to drug use, case studies relating to bee, hornet and wasp stings, articles about hypersensitivity to hymenoptera (sawflies,ants, wasps and bees) stings. It's caused by pretty much anything you can be allergic to. e.g.

Conditions:
Angioedema;Bronchial asthma;Exercise induced anaphylaxis;Food allergy;Idiopathic
anaphylaxis;Mastocytosis;Serum sickness;Urticaria;Churg-Strauss syndrome

Drugs:
Antibiotics; Analgesics; Anticoagulants; Antineoplastics; Contrast media; Cortic
osteroids; Intravenous anaesthetics; Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs; Skin
disinfectants; Thrombolytics

Environmental exposures:
Ant stings; Bee stings; Wasp stings; Jellyfish sting; Grass cutting; Poison ivy;
Latex contact; Limpet ingestion; Millet allergy; Shellfish poisoning; Snake ven
om;
​

What I didn't find was anything suggesting wasp stings were worse than bee stings.
Bees also have those cell-degrading peptide thingies.
I seem to get stung by my bees quite a lot but can't remember the last time I was stung by a wasp.

I'm sure there are people here who could access any references Karol could give out.

Attributing deaths due to Kounis Syndrome to wasps looks like a very dodgy thing to do. I hope it's not in anyones advertising material.

 

[Chris Luck]

Come on, fess up, they are just a little bit cute.

http://wildlifeinfrance.com/european-hornet-vespa-crabro-frelon-in-france.html

Chris

 

[The Drone Ranger]

On the whole wasps are a good thing
In the garden at the beginning of the year they attack and eat caterpillars
Apparently caterpillars drop to the ground when they sense what they think is a wasp and that alone helps protect veg and flowers
They eat protein mostly insect pests which they carry back to the nest.
This protein is fed to the larva which then give up a drop of sweet liquid to the adult
When there are fewer larva at the end of the season the wasp workers look for that sweetness fix elsewhere
Also at the end of the wasp season the queen has laid a new generation of queens for next year
If the nests are destroyed at this time of year that will have an unhelpful effect on the garden next year
It doesn't have much effect on the activities of the worker wasps on the sugar trail
A wasp trap on the other hand with jam as the attractant kills lots of worker wasps, who are the problem,but without having an effect on next years useful wasps

 

[Karol]

Actually I doubt that you do understand my sentiments Karol, I'm interested in all life and not ending up with an impoverished "safe" world made up of theme parks with fizzy, not good for your health, drinks and junk food.

Chris

So mums with kids at theme parks shouldn't be protected?

But if they go to a conservation zoo that does brilliant work around the world do they then qualify for protection? Because guess what, we protect a growing number of those.

Then again, what about National Trust sites? Do visitors attending National Trust sites qualify for protection? Oh, we're protecting those as well!

What about kiddies hospices? You know, children with suppressed immune systems in the last few months of life? Do they qualify for protection or would you consign them to spending their remaining days in doors on the few glorious days of summer that they have left?

You're right, I retract my statement. I don't understand your sentiments.

 

[Karol]

<snip> Attributing deaths due to Kounis Syndrome to wasps looks like a very dodgy thing to do. <snip>

Why?

We attribute deaths to smoking, alcohol, drugs and even car accidents.

Kounis is an emerging story. The nature of it means that it has gone largely undetected until recently thanks to Professor Kounis. Now that we are starting to understand more and recognise it better what should we do?

Stick our heads in the sand?

Stents are a relatively recent medical advance that give a new lease of life to many patients. If wasp stings represent an elevated risk to these patients then surely the responsible thing is to make such patients aware so that they don't take unnecessary risks because they aren't well informed.

We teach the green cross code to children because of the dangers of crossing the road. Is that inducing panic? Hardly!

I suspect that Kounis is not as rare as some commentators make out. This is a story that I have been following since late 2009 when I started to see a pattern emerging in medical cases being filed across the globe sufficiently so to start an awareness campaign (within the health care professions and the pest control industry). It has to be understood that just because something hasn't been reported doesn't mean it's not there. Quite often it's because it hasn't been looked for that there hasn't been the accumulation of evidence. If someone dies suddenly of a heart attack with symptoms of a heart attack, no medic is going to conduct expensive investigations to determine whether a wasp was responsible (or any other agent for that matter) if they don't associate the wasp as probable cause.

What makes wasps different is that they have venom which works on purpose to destabilise mast cells and therefore have the potential to precipitate Kounis type reactions. Now that medics are starting to get their head around this I think we will see more similar reports. Have a look at these:

http://www.casesjournal.com/content/2/1/7800
http://www.hindawi.com/crim/cardiology/2012/701753/
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23363947
http://www.koreancircj.kr/DOIx.php?id=10.4070/kcj.2013.43.8.561

If you read this small selection of papers then you might notice something interesting. All the papers are recent and they all make claims to be 'first time' observations of wasp sting induced Kounis or report Kounis as something that is very rare. In another paper Brown et al reports that up to 10% of patients (healthy volunteers) suffered Kounis type reactions after stings:

This paper is interesting;

http://www.szd.si/user_files/vsebina/Zdravniski_Vestnik/2012/junij/500-4.pdf

especially the quote;

"Although the syndrome has been encountered
increasingly in clinical practice,
its true frequency is difficult to determine
due to inadequate reporting.4 However, in
a recent study two of 21 healthy volunteers
developed chest pain with ischemic electrocardiographic
changes during a diagnostic
insect sting challenge."

I repeat that this is not about scaring people. It's about education and raising awareness so that people can take simple steps to reduce unnecessary risks.

 

[PBee]

......
Peanuts!

The average nest will eradicate between 4,000 to 5,000 Kg of insect pests per season (4-5 metric tonnes). With up to 1000 nests per square mile that's 4,000,000Kg to 5,000,000Kg per season or 15,444 to 19,305 Kg per hectare per year (assuming 1 square mile = 259 hectares).

I'm happy PBee for you to tell me I'm wrong and to keep feeding me papers that I've seen a dozen times. You can keep repeating things but it won't change my understanding of wasp behaviour and I certainly won't do anything to undermine the successes that I have with IWM and that I guess is the nub of it. Academia can be a very abstract and disconnected environment. I prefer being on the front line where results speak for themselves.

The average V. vulgaris nest in England completes the cycle in 170 days (180 for V. germanica),(Archer 2010). In New Zealand the colony cycle is longer, so the foraging period is longer, and there have been studies done on foraged prey biomass/season/nest.

V. germanica and V. vulgaris collected an estimated 1800 g and 600 g of prey nest-1 season-1 respectively. For Ruakura an estimated 11800 prey-carrying foragers ha-1 season-1 returned to nests of V. vulgaris and V. germanica combined (Table 2). This converts to an estimated 50 g of prey ha-1 season-1 being taken into nests when averaged over the whole site (Table 2). For the block of highest wasp density the estimate of prey biomass was 920 g ha-1 season-1. For Mystery Creek an estimated 75400 prey-carrying foragers ha-1 season-1 returned to nests of V. vulgaris and V. germanica combined. This converted to 470 g of prey ha-1 season-1. For the block of highest nest density the prey biomass was an estimated 11.28 kg ha-1 season-1. http://www.nzes.org.nz/nzje/free_issues/NZJEcol17_1_5.pdf

The maximum recorded for an overwintered colony of V. germanica in NZ is 99kg.

The estimated 99 kg of prey taken into Nest 2 is high compared with the estimated 1.8 kg taken into annual V. germanica colonies (Harris & Oliver 1993). Combining the consumption estimates for overwintered colonies with those of annual colonies in the same habitat (0.05 and 0.45 kg/ha; Harris & Oliver 1993) leads to total prey consumption estimates of 0.17 kg/ha for Ruakura and 1.62 kg/ha for Mystery Creek. This places consumption at these two sites near the lower end of the range of estimates for beech forest with honeydew (0.4-15.3 kg/ha; Harris 1991). http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03014223.1996.9518061

 

[whoosling]

There was nothing until six weeks ago, now the worst in five years! Can't find the nests either!

 

[Chris Luck]

It is of course normal to not see many until late July / August and then for the numbers to rapidly increase as the colony grows expo.

I wish we had a lot more this year, all there is to any degree here are Hornets - both types. I suppose the problem here is no sticky fizzy drinks or sweet foods.

Chris

 

[Erichalfbee]

One of my colonies was being really hammered. They were coping but attacks were relentless. I put a trap next to the entrance a week ago and it has done the trick. Quite a few wasps and none at the entrance any longer. They will all be busy on the ivy soon than heavens

 

[Karol]

The average V. vulgaris nest in England completes the cycle in 170 days (180 for V. germanica),(Archer 2010). In New Zealand the colony cycle is longer, so the foraging period is longer, and there have been studies done on foraged prey biomass/season/nest<snip>

The maximum recorded for an overwintered colony of V. germanica in NZ is 99kg.<snip>

It made me smile when you posted the second paper looking at overwintering germanica because guess what - it's an example of how the biology of germanica has changed in response to different environmental conditions, i.e. 2 year life cycle instead of one with the colony surviving through winter - something that just doesn't happen in temperate northern climates.

As for the rest then it made me sigh!

The two papers you posted have exactly the same flaw in each that compromises the results/observations in each. Perhaps PBee you might try to work out for yourself what the flaw is?

And yes I've seen these papers previously and no they don't change anything and I still stand by my original statement which I am happy to repeat, i.e.

"Peanuts!

The average nest will eradicate between 4,000 to 5,000 Kg of insect pests per season (4-5 metric tonnes). With up to 1000 nests per square mile that's 4,000,000Kg to 5,000,000Kg per season or 15,444 to 19,305 Kg per hectare per year (assuming 1 square mile = 259 hectares).

I'm happy PBee for you to tell me I'm wrong and to keep feeding me papers that I've seen a dozen times. You can keep repeating things but it won't change my understanding of wasp behaviour and I certainly won't do anything to undermine the successes that I have with IWM and that I guess is the nub of it. Academia can be a very abstract and disconnected environment. I prefer being on the front line where results speak for themselves."

If you work out the flaw then you'll better understand my comments about academia and disconnected environment.

 

[PBee]

If you make a claim, which is not a previously established fact or otherwise qualified, then you should include a trusted source or describe your logic based on such sources.

.... And the rebound in wasp populations has seen a decline in pest populations, i.e. far fewer flies, caterpillars, ticks and varroa etc etc!

Varroa?

 

[richardbees]

I hate the little sods!

 

[sharonh]

One of my colonies was being really hammered. They were coping but attacks were relentless. I put a trap next to the entrance a week ago and it has done the trick. Quite a few wasps and none at the entrance any longer. They will all be busy on the ivy soon than heavens

Hi , Had the same problem a month ago, used same trap as you have, did the trick. You caught quite a few, what did you use with the activator to attract them in? Hope we have no more problems with wasps & hornets this year.

 

[Karol]

If you make a claim, which is not a previously established fact or otherwise qualified, then you should include a trusted source or describe your logic based on such sources.


Varroa?

Keep digging PBee - you might discredit me eventually. Meanwhile, the sun will still rise and wasps will continue to behave in the way they do for reasons that only they understand whether we humans write about them or not!

Let me know when you've worked out the flaws in your trusted sources.

 

[PBee]

Keep digging PBee - you might discredit me eventually. Meanwhile, the sun will still rise and wasps will continue to behave in the way they do for reasons that only they understand whether we humans write about them or not!

Let me know when you've worked out the flaws in your trusted sources.

Accuracy is important and I have a genuine, if amateur, interest in wasps so if your information does not align with existing science you must expect challenge. I don't see why you should have a problem stating where you got the 4-5 tonne figure and it would be a more direct and relevant approach.

 

[user 6228]

an example of where academic papers can lead one a stray
Flow currents and ventilation in Langstroth beehives due to brood
thermoregulation efforts of honeybee
http://www.uoguelph.ca/canpolin/Pub...al 2011 flow currents in Langstroth hives.pdf

this is a detailed simulation of the gas flows in a langstroth hive due to repiration and heat.

however, there are two assumptions in the simulation that cast some on
the conclusions.

For the energy equation, the inside walls of the beehive and
the parts of the frames not covered by honeybees are assumed to
be insulated. this means perfectly insulated
and In addition,we assume that condensation of water vapor is negligible and that all the water remains in its vapor form in the air mixture