solarpunk memes

The most aggressive bees I tend to encounter are male carpenter bees. They are highly territorial and they'll even buzz a human to scare them off. However, there's no threat.

No threat of stinging, anyway. They will absolutely wreak havoc on a wood framed house.

bzzzzbzzzBZZZZZ

Yes, sir, I see you. I see your little pile of sawdust on the fence, too. No, I'm not going to screw with it. I'm just installing this gate latch."

bzzzbzbbzbbzbzbzbzbzzzzz

This would go a lot faster if I didn't have to keep ducking.

BZZZZZZ

Okay, I'm done, jeez.

BZZZZZzzzbzzzz^bzzzz^

...aaaaand under the fascia board it goes. Shit.

Many wasp species, while not considered pollinators, still transport pollen and pollinate plants. Others hunt pest insects. There are also many species that are vital as prey for birds

They eat the things that eat the things you eat.

(e.g. aphids, caterpillars and mfcking thrips and leaf miners)

PS: ok just one more: if bees are the plant matchmakers, wasps are broad spectrum pest exterminators.

People who post shit like this are being intentionally obtuse and provocative. "Wasp" is a big tent classification, and what everyone else thinks of are a few specific creatures.

A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant;

Vast majority of things that are "wasps" don't bite/sting and many are important pollinators.

The bitey stingy ones? Fuck em.

Everyone thank OP for pollinating!

Ehem

They're like meth head gang members that also call their gang to attack you after they do. That's what terrifies me of them.

So, first of all a bee-ologist can only help you marginally, as bees are in the same order as wasps, hornets and ants but relatively far removed from them. Hornets (genus vespa) and classic wasps (genus vespula) on the other hand share the same subfamily vespinae and are both considered wasps. This was a nice short dive into wikipedia. As I am a crystallographer any real entomologist can feel free to correct me.

Fun fact: I've been doing a lot of reading about indigenous peoples, and one of the constant themes is how those peoples' traditional life ways were net positives for the environment. In California, for instance, Native American agriculture involved controlled burns every twenty years or so - keeping the soil fertile and encouraging a healthy mix of the "wild" species they cared for. They had been doing that for maybe 20,000 years. So when "environmentalists" in the early 20th century decided native lifeways were primitive and bad for the environment, and established enormous national parks where natives were no longer permitted to hunt or gather and fires were stamped out immediately, those national parks turned into tinder boxes - instead of the controlled burns the plants had evolved to take advantage of, we ended up with decades of fuel building up in the undergrowth, turning into massive uncontrolled burns that killed everything, and then invasive species rolled up and finished off the native plants.

"But untouched pristine wilderness"... No. That never existed. That's a racist trope spread by white colonists who wanted to think of Native Americans as enemies of nature in order to justify genocide. It's the opposite of the noble savage myth and equally racist. Fuck John Muir.

Over and over again, when you compare areas where indigenous people had lived in their traditional lifeways to areas where the people were killed or exiled but the environment was left untouched, the areas where humans were genocided have less species diversity, less fertility, and less healthy environments overall.

And if we, 21st century humanity, can use our science and technology to rediscover the old knowledge, we can take up our previous role and manage the environment around us for the benefit of all. Hell, in a lot of environments we have a duty to do so - we brought the rabbits to Australia, who's going to get rid of them if not for us?

And all that rant is to say, humans aren't the problem. Capitalism is the problem. Greed is the problem. Humans have lived as beneficial parts of the environment for approximately 150,000 years and we can do so again.

Aedes mosquitos serve no known ecological purpose. They are purely parasitic, are not unique pollinators (as in, any plant they do pollinate is also pollinated by other species), and do not make up a substantial portion of the diet of any species.

I would venture to say their extinction would have a positive effect on the Ecosystem by closing that transmission vector for the diseases they carry.