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Social wasps are considered pests when they become excessively common, or nest close to buildings. People are most often stung in late summer and early autumn, when wasp colonies stop breeding new workers; the existing workers search for sugary foods and are more likely to come into contact with humans.
Many parasitoid wasps are considered beneficial to humans because they naturally control agricultural pests. Some are applied commercially in biological pest control, starting in the 1920s with Encarsia formosa to control whitefly in greenhouses. Historically, parasitoidism in wasps influenced the thinking of Charles Darwin. [3]
The wasps, bees, and ants together make up the suborder (and clade) Apocrita, characterized by a constriction between the first and second abdominal segments called a wasp-waist , also involving the fusion of the first abdominal segment to the thorax. Also, the larvae of all Apocrita lack legs, prolegs, or ocelli.
Polistes fuscatus, whose common name is the dark or northern paper wasp, is widely found in eastern North America, from southern Canada through the southern United States. [2] It often nests around human development.
Most wasps are beneficial in their natural habitat and are critically important in natural biocontrol. [3] Paper wasps feed on sugars like nectar, aphid honeydew and the sugary liquid produced by their larvae. Because they are a known pollinator and feed on known garden pests, paper wasps are often considered to be beneficial by gardeners. [10]
Charles Darwin considered the evolution of eusociality a major problem for his theory of natural selection.In The Origin of Species, he described the existence of sterile worker castes in the social insects as "the one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable and actually fatal to my whole theory".
They are most diverse in desert regions of the world, as they are typically associated with solitary bee and wasp species, which are also most diverse in such areas. Their brood parasitic lifestyle has led to the evolution of fascinating adaptations, including chemical mimicry of host odors by some species.
Typically, paper wasps are relatively unaggressive, only attacking humans and animals if they or their nests are being threatened. As in other aculeate wasps, only females have the ability to sting. [16] Unlike bees, wasps do not have barbed stingers that can be lost, so they are able to sting multiple times to defend a nest. [17]