The most commonly known wasps, such as yellowjackets and hornets, are in the family Vespidae and are eusocial, living together in a nest with an egg-laying queen and non-reproducing workers.

Eusociality is favoured by the unusual haplodiploid system of sex determination in Hymenoptera, as it makes sisters exceptionally closely related to each other.

They are a successful and diverse group of insects with tens of thousands of described species; wasps have spread to all parts of the world except for the polar regions.

The wasps are a cosmopolitan paraphyletic grouping of hundreds of thousands of species,[1][2] consisting of the narrow-waisted clade Apocrita without the ants and bees.

The Vespidae include the extinct genus Palaeovespa, seven species of which are known from the Eocene rocks of the Florissant fossil beds of Colorado and from fossilised Baltic amber in Europe.

In other species, the eggs are laid directly into plant tissues and form galls, which protect the developing larvae from predators, but not necessarily from other parasitic wasps.

[11] The various tarantula hawk wasps are of a similar size[12] and can overpower a spider many times its own weight, and move it to its burrow, with a sting that is excruciatingly painful to humans.

All species of social wasps construct their nests using some form of plant fiber (mostly wood pulp) as the primary material, though this can be supplemented with mud, plant secretions (e.g., resin), and secretions from the wasps themselves; multiple fibrous brood cells are constructed, arranged in a honeycombed pattern, and often surrounded by a larger protective envelope.

[26] Potter wasps similarly build vase-like nests from mud, often with multiple cells, attached to the twigs of trees or against walls.

Members of the family Chrysididae, the cuckoo wasps, are kleptoparasites and lay their eggs in the nests of unrelated host species.

[25] Like all insects, wasps have a hard exoskeleton which protects their three main body parts, the head, the mesosoma (including the thorax and the first segment of the abdomen) and the metasoma.

Wasps possess mandibles adapted for biting and cutting, like those of many other insects, such as grasshoppers, but their other mouthparts are formed into a suctorial proboscis, which enables them to drink nectar.

[31] Adult solitary wasps mainly feed on nectar, but the majority of their time is taken up by foraging for food for their carnivorous young, mostly insects or spiders.

These include both sugars and amino acids, and may provide essential protein-building nutrients that are otherwise unavailable to the adults (who cannot digest proteins).

[38] In wasps, as in other Hymenoptera, sex is determined by a haplodiploid system, which means that females are unusually closely related to their sisters, enabling kin selection to favour the evolution of eusocial behaviour.

[25] Experimental infection of Muscidifurax uniraptor with the bacterium Wolbachia induced thelytokous reproduction and an inability to produce fertile, viable male offspring.

[40] Sibling-mating avoidance reduces inbreeding depression that is largely due to the expression of homozygous deleterious recessive mutations.

Some of the largest species, including Rhyssa persuasoria and Megarhyssa macrurus, parasitise horntails, large sawflies whose adult females also have impressively long ovipositors.

[49] Some parasitic species have a mutualistic relationship with a polydnavirus that weakens the host's immune system and replicates in the oviduct of the female wasp.

[60] The roughly 140 species of beewolf (Philanthinae) hunt bees, including honeybees, to provision their nests; the adults feed on nectar and pollen.

[63] The honey buzzard attacks the nests of social hymenopterans, eating wasp larvae; it is the only known predator of the dangerous[64] Asian giant hornet or "yak-killer" (Vespa mandarinia).

[71] Some species of parasitic wasp, especially in groups such as Aphelinidae, Braconidae, Mymaridae, and Trichogrammatidae, are exploited commercially to provide biological control of insect pests.

Encarsia is being tested in greenhouses to control whitefly pests of tomato and cucumber, and to a lesser extent of aubergine (eggplant), flowers such as marigold, and strawberry.

[80] A fashion for wasp waisted female silhouettes with sharply cinched waistlines emphasizing the wearer's hips and bust arose repeatedly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

[81][82] The Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote the comedy play Σφῆκες (Sphēkes), The Wasps, first put on in 422 BC.

The day after, a cyclist riding, feet up, down the hill between Sevenoaks and Tonbridge, very narrowly missed running over a second of these giants that was crawling across the roadway.

In an 1860 letter to the American naturalist Asa Gray, Darwin wrote: I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us.

I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.

[91] The eighth of these, an aircraft carrier, gained two Second World War battle stars, prompting Winston Churchill to remark "Who said a Wasp couldn't sting twice?

"[89] In the Second World War, a German self-propelled howitzer was named Wespe,[92] while the British developed the Wasp flamethrower from the Bren Gun Carrier.