Hacker News Reader

Comment by romanovcode | Hacker News Reader

Why are wasps protected in Germany? I understand bees, but what good are wasps for?

Without the wasps crawling into the sugar dispensers at every single outdoor café in Germany all summer long, people would eat the sugar and create a diabetes epidemic.

At least that was my impression in Berlin; wasps got all the sugar, Berliners stayed pretty thin for the most part.

Sounds like i need more wasps in my house!

Ah, this explains the bitterness of Berliners

I'll add my own annecdote to this article. We had a wasp nest under the eaves of the house and I managed to successfully move them into a little hutch I built near the garden. I can't say I directly observed them saving the tomatoes, but we did have fewer tomato hornworms than in previous years.

They were also really docile and tolerated a good deal of me fumbling around with the nest. I waited until it was cold out and covered up pretty thouroghly, but they were mostly content to let me flop them around with a set of long BBQ tongs.

Despite their aggression and desire for sugar, wasps are useful and important pollinators the same way that bees are.

They also annihilate the bees which are much better pollinators

Germany has some very silly laws.

The wasp protection one gets broken all the time for obvious reasons.

See https://www.thoughtco.com/what-good-are-wasps-1968081

I've come around on wasps. They just do their thing. You got stung? Don't tread on them.

Sometimes wasps have other ideas about "treading on them" like "You are near and made a sudden move, you are threat". It gets worse when you are allergic to wasps. I've worked near a place where transport company cleaned their syrup and milk carrying trailers, so we sometimes had a lot of wasps and one of coworkers had to constantly have adrenaline with him. If he got stung and couldn't do it himself, we were trained on how to jab him and call ambulance.

> one of coworkers had to constantly have adrenaline with him. If he got stung and couldn't do it himself, we were trained on how to jab him and call ambulance.

FWIW, this bit is true of everyone I've known who was aware of an anaphylactic allergy, independent of their likelihood of exposure to the allergen. "Carry an EpiPen, know how to use it, make sure some of the people around you are aware of your allergy and know how to handle a reaction" is a very light-weight and reliable solution to "something relatively common could easily kill me".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com