[8] Sumner has looked at the effect of social insect populations on their environments such as the impact of Argentine ants on seed dispersal.
[14] Sumner's lab are researching how social wasps might communicate within their colony about where resources are, perhaps like honey bees do the waggle dance.
[15] In 2019 she published a Proceedings of the Royal Society B article on showing how social paper wasps can be successful predators of two economically important pests the sugarcane borer and the fall armyworm.
[17] Sumner cofounded the citizen science initiative The Big Wasp Survey in 2017 with Professor Adam Hart to raise awareness of the role and diversity of social wasp species in the UK[18] and to compare the accuracy of citizen science data with long-term biological recording data.
[28] She has written a popular science book titled Endless Forms on wasps, published by William Collins in 2022.