Everyone hates wasps. But this scientist wants us to love them

Six months after he published “On the Origin of Species,” Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his friend, Asa Gray. He was troubled by a family of parasitic wasps, the ichneumonidae , that lays its eggs in the body of another insect, such as a caterpillar; when the young hatch, they devour the host. “I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae,” he wrote . The creature is cited as one of the factors that led him to question divine creation.

Hatred of wasps goes back thousands of years — Aristotle denigrated them as “devoid of the extraordinary features” which bees possess. But Seirian Sumner, professor of behavioral ecology at University College London (UCL), wants to show there’s more to wasps than meets the eye. She has