A young friend asked me this question while considering the aggressiveness of wasps compared to the superiority and human-friendliness of bees.
It's an interesting question, especially coming from one with no particular faith that I'm aware of. There's clearly an underlying idea that things must have a point - a teleological purpose, if you will. Bees make honey - good enough. But what are wasps for? What an interesting question to ask - whether you're a believer or not. Although the follow-on question for a non-believer is whether anything is actually for anything.
In the great scheme of human-insect interaction, it's questionable whether wasps have been better or worse served by human beings. Wasps, of course, suffer from our hatred of their irrational, erratic and - if I may say it - waspish behaviour. If we find wasp nests in our immediate vicinity we like to have them exterminated - although we admire the intricate and beautiful geometry of their former homes once they're all dead. We're sympathetic and wistful like that. Whereas you might think bees have benefited from being our friends. But in fact we have had as much of a good effect on our "friends" the bees as Andy Coulson has had on David Cameron. Until recent times the recommended way of taking honey from bee hives was to kill all the bees first: I append below the "Honey-taking" episode from Hardy's wonderful Under the Greenwood Tree. Is that a way to treat your friends?
But of course that is all to dwell on our guilt with respect to our little six-legged neighbours. And my question was - what are wasps for? In one sense, if I'm going to get all anthropocentric, they are actually relatively useful late in the season - they kill caterpillars and other pests, once they've got over being all shirty and hungover from eating all the fermenting windfall apples. But that's assuming that the worth of a wasp is only to be measured by how useful it is for us.
Can't we instead look at wasps and say what are they for - they're for themselves. To you and me, they may appear quite natty in their stripes, they may be impressive in the hideous way they hijack caterpillars and ladybirds. They may be impressive in the zig-zaggy flightpaths - at least up to the point when a copy of Private Eye brings their career to an abrupt and quivering end. But the wasp is the reminder that when God made the universe, (s)he wasn't just thinking about how to design it for our benefit - nice as it is, and happy as we are in the Goldilocks Zone of a sun with a billion years to run before things get scary. No, the wasp, when all's said and done, is for being a wasp. Anything else is secondary. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go. We're overwhelmed with the stung remnants of today's cider-makers. Drayton tried laying on hands but to be honest it just made matters worse. So we're going with cold flannels and quiet prayer.
Honey Taking, and Afterwards - from Under the Greenwood Tree, by Thomas Hardy
An apparent embarrassment of Fancy at the presence of Shiner caused a silence in the assembly, during which the preliminaries of execution were arranged, the matches fixed, the stake kindled, the two hives placed over the two holes, and the earth stopped round the edges. Geoffrey then stood erect, and rather more, to straighten his backbone after the digging.
"They were a peculiar family," said Mr. Shiner, regarding the hives reflectively.
Geoffrey nodded.
"Those holes will be the grave of thousands!" said Fancy. "I think 'tis rather a cruel thing to do."
Her father shook his head. "No," he said, tapping the hives to shake the dead bees from their cells, "if you suffocate 'em this way, they only die once: if you fumigate 'em in the new way, they come to life again, and die o' starvation; so the pangs o' death be twice upon 'em."
"I incline to Fancy's notion," said Mr. Shiner, laughing lightly.
"The proper way to take honey, so that the bees be neither starved nor murdered, is a puzzling matter," said the keeper steadily.
"I should like never to take it from them," said Fancy.
"But 'tis the money," said Enoch musingly. "For without money man is a shadder!"
Having been the (not very grateful) recipient of both wasp and bee stings, every year of my life, I have only this to add.
ReplyDeleteBees sting from fright,
Wasps sting from spite.
PS. I don't kill either species.
Of course, until we've been getting it cruelly wrong for a while we don't seem to develop an awareness of how to do it right. Current bees benefit from our appalling treatment of previous generations.
ReplyDeleteCan we evolve to by-pass that cruel stage? At the moment, it doesn't even look as if we were capable of recognising our interconnectedness with everything in time to save ourselves.
Didn't the big man himself, Charles Darwin mull over the relationship between wasps and caterpillars and reach a similar conclusion? I guess modern Biologists would say that the purpose of a wasp is to transmit it's genes to the next generation of wasps but that's complicated in their case by the whole queen-worker thing; Douglas Adams summarised our relationship with nature better with the humorous analogy about the puddle that thinks the hole in the road which he fills perfectly was made especially for him.
ReplyDeleteHowever, Cider most definitely does have a point, i.e. to assist in the analysis of teleological arguments, and I'm eagerly awaiting my free sample ;)
Steve
ReplyDeleteThe queen-worker itself is quite simple. Even though the worker has no children of her own, by defending the queen (her sister) she will ensure her genes are passed on. But whether what the wasp is "for" is to pass those genes on... the genes don't know it, and the wasp don't know it... so is that really a "purpose" if nothing has "purposed" it?
AE, yes I'd say so, why would something have to understand its purpose in order to have a purpose?
ReplyDeleteAnyway, teleology, shmeleology, what about that cider? ;)