Always worth looking twice at wasps! 

Most people think of wasps as a nuisance when they start to build their nests under the eaves, but they’re wrong! Wasps are amazing! The paper wasps found in South Africa are incredible tiny societies.

If you watch them closely, you realise these societies are full of acts of selfless cooperation, internal power struggles, fascinating dominance hierarchies, and so many mysteries that we don’t yet understand. Life on a wasp nest is like a mini soap opera, but one that can give us insights into big evolutionary questions such as the origin of cooperation. 

We use wasps to study how ‘altruism’ evolves. We want to understand why a young female wasp would make the decision not to leave the family and find her own nest, but rather to stay and help rear her brothers and sisters. Biologists think this is all about helping other wasps who share the same genes and are close family to populate further than other wasp  families. 

But there are loads of factors that can tip the balance one way or the other. Dr Patrick Kennedy a postdoctoral research associate in the School of Biological Sciences, University of Bristol in the United Kingdom has chosen the Magaliesberg Biosphere Reserve to research wasps and 
their behaviour.