Seirian Sumner
Endless Forms: The Secret World of Wasps
Collins; 2022
This is a book about wasps. It isn’t a book of wasps; not a field guide; nor an academic description of the minutiae of wasps. But it is about wasps.
Prof. Seirian Sumner (full disclosure: I have met her) has devoted her academic life to studying wasps, and specifically (but not only) social wasps like our friendly picnic-bothering yellowjacket. So this could have been an academic tome, but it isn’t. Instead it is a very accessible 380 pages of description which takes us through the world of wasps: what they are, how and why they work – and indeed why some seem unreasonably interested in our picnics. All of that is held together with stories and anecdotes about often hair-raising research field trips; some successful, others a total disaster.
With around 100,000 known species in the world, wasps are important: as predators and parasites of other insects, and as pollinators. No, don’t panic as the vast majority of those 100,000 species are solitary wasps; many are tiny (2mm or less) and most don’t sting. There are only 74 known species of hornets and yellowjackets worldwide, and it is these yellowjackets which bother our picnics. This is something which Seirian stresses and explains: they may be after a share of your chicken or burger; or late in the summer a share of your strawberry jam. Give them a share, on the side, at the other end of the table and they’ll generally leave you alone. Oh and DO NOT go flapping around: that’s the surest way to annoy them and get stung as you’ll remind them of their arch-predator, the badger.
Most of the social wasps are hunters, after juicy morsels of meat (usually arthropods, but also carrion) to feed their brood. The solitary wasps hunt too: some are predators of a meat feast for their young; others lay eggs on the still living meat to parasitise them. Yes, Nature is gruesome, but without wasp pest controllers we’d be knee deep in creepie-crawlies. Seirian estimates that even in a bad year a social yellowjacket nest can get through almost 300,000 arthropods; it can be 8-10 times that in a bumper year. That’s a lot of caterpillars!
And to cap it all? Without the ancestral wasps, we would have neither ants nor bees for both groups are descendants of ancient wasps. Ants are wasps which (mostly) lost their wings. Bees are wasps which forgot how to hunt. Social wasps are unusual in that they too have learnt to live in colonies.
Seirian takes us through all of this. How did wasps develop such a multitude of forms. Their lifestyles and how the societies of social wasps work. Why they’re important. How scientists have managed to work all this out.
This is a fascinating book, well written, eminently readable, and almost chatty. I found it hard to put down and had to restrict myself to a couple of chapters a night in order to not burn too much (expensive) midnight oil. I guarantee you’ll come away with a totally different view of wasps.
Overall Rating: ★★★★★
Greater London has thousands of pubs – so many that probably no-one had counted them; and in any event the list would change daily. In 136 pages the authors of this slim volume describe the origins of over 650 of the more unusual or interesting pub names in Greater London – all the way from “Aces & Eights” (Tufnell Park) to the “Zetland Arms” (South Kensington). As one can imagine, at an average of about 5 pubs and a photograph per page, the descriptions are not very detailed. This is a shame, as there is undoubtedly more to be told about most of these names, and many others.
This is a curious little book which does very much what it says in the title. It is about cleaning, as zen monks do it in the monastery, as well as meditation. The life of the zen monk is hard – much harder than we realise; for another perspective see 
Kate Bennett (Editor)
No, almost 2000 pages is not an exaggeration. Amazon quotes the work as being 1968 pages. So no wonder OUP have split the paperback edition into two volumes.