Beachcomber: 101 years old and still treating wasps with trepidation...

Admittedly, I have never been very keen on looking wasps in the face.

Like all buzzing insects, they infuriate me and like all stinging insects, they terrify me.

So my general policy on seeing a wasp has always been to flee if it is flying in my direction or splat it with a rolled up newspaper if it is stationary.

But that may now have to change following the latest findings.

The paper is titled “Sex differences in face but not colour learning in Polites fuscatus paper wasps” and reports the results of experiments to test the learning abilities of male and female wasps.

To measure their general learning ability, they trained the wasps to discriminate between different colours and found that there was no difference between males and females in their abilities to do so but when it came to discriminating between the faces of different wasps, the females did much better.

The researchers point out that female wasps “live in cooperative groups where interactions depend on individual face recognition and excel at learning female faces”.

Male wasps, on the other hand “lack the type of variable facial patterns necessary for individual face recognition and do not participate in the type of social interactions known to favour individual recognition in females”.

Earlier experiments in which the same researchers had participated had shown that “worker wasps are less able to learn and remember individual conspecific faces than queen wasps”.

Naturally I was fascinated by all this and wondered how the wasps felt about it, so conquering my fear for a moment, I put the matter to three passing wasps, one male, one female and one queen.

The queen, as might have been expected, was rather haughty and said: “Of course I recognise my subjects’ faces. I go on a lot of royal walkabouts and meet a large number of them.”

Then she added: “Must buzz off now. Important royal work to attend to.”

Feeling a little relieved, I asked the other two wasps what they thought about the research.

“Well they could have just asked me instead of doing all that elaborate learning stuff,” the female replied. “I could have told them these males are all the same. We girls are much more sociable and get to know each other properly.”

“That’s hardly fair,” the male said. “We’re far too busy to gossip and form social bonds. Anyway, I do know who you are. You’re Waspy McWasp-Face, aren’t you?”

“You call us all Waspy McWasp-Face,” the female buzzed angrily,“ which just proves my point.”

I thought it best at that point to change the subject a little.

“The research with queen wasps reported that you workers can’t remember other wasps after a separation of six days,” I said. “Is that right?”

“A week is a long time in pollination,” they said in unison and I left them to it.