Desborough's Millennium Green Trust holds the Green in perpetuity for the people of Desborough. Designed by local people, it has ten dedicated benches, a scented raised bed and a butterfly corner.
The hedges were planted as wildlife corridors and the trees were selected as mainly native species (arrived between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago), together with three species introduced more recently by the Romans.
The most striking feature near the entrance was the apple trees left over from the land's former use as a market garden.
Windfalls covered the ground there, and I suddenly thought "September ... decaying fruit ... wasps. Is this a good idea?" Then I looked more carefully and found there was not a single wasp there.
I posted a video here a couple of months ago that said insects doing badly in one wet summer is nothing to worry about, but the long-term decline in their numbers certainly is.
Today I've found an article on the decline in wasp numbers by the Guardian environment reporter Helena Hornet, which...
Sorry, that should be Helena Horton. She writes:
Professor Seirian Sumner is an entomologist at University College London who has spent her career studying wasps. She said she was “thrilled” that people were worrying about low wasp numbers because “usually they only get airtime when they start annoying people”.
And Professor Sumner says:
“The science tells us that cold, wet springs mean that foundresses – the big queen wasps that start appearing in spring – struggle to successfully grow a nest. This is because they are solitary at this time in the colony cycle and so need to do all the nest building, egg laying, prey hunting all by themselves.
“Rain and cold make this difficult; and of course their prey will have been affected by the poor weather too, compounding the challenge. So with fewer successfully founded nests in spring there will be fewer mature nests now. And predictably, fewer wasps bothering people.
“This is bad news. Wasps perform many important roles in the environment, as natural pest controllers, as pollinators and also in the case of the yellowjacket they are important decomposers – that’s why they happily scavenge the carrion at your BBQ,” said Sumner.
In the long term, wasp numbers were thought to be declining overall because of human activity, she said. “They will be affected in the same way as other insects by chemicals like pesticides – after all, these chemicals are designed to screw up insect physiology and neurology.”
So, yes, we should worry.
Other experts quoted in the article share her respect for wasps. I am reminded of the summer when my mother and here second husband were away on one of their long canal holidays and I found a wasps nest at their house.
The man who came to deal with it was also respectful. "If they start a nest and it's not exactly right, they'll abandon it and start a new one." He could have been a minor character in a good British comedy.
I'll leave you with a memory of how things used to be.
Discussing at the weekend the concept of the "waspy bin". School playground bins so stuffed with rotting lolly wrappers and crumpled tins of Fanta that they were orbited by a permanent cloud of angry wasps. Does the waspy bin still exist?
— Bob Fischer (@Bob_Fischer) September 9, 2024
No comments:
Post a Comment