Are Wasps Beneficial Around the Home?

While wasps are most often associated with their painful sting and other annoying behaviors, they often fulfill several important roles around your home. While it can be hard to justify leaving them to their own devices when they aren’t an immediate threat, there are many reasons why you should leave wasps that aren’t directly impacting you alone. In this article, we will explore some of the benefits of wasps that may not be immediately noticeable whenever you see them.

Wasp species can often be found nearly anywhere around your home. However, if they are nesting in the crevices near your doors or inside of your flower bed, they may seem a little too close for comfort for the majority of homeowners. While there are thousands of different wasp species around the world, they all play an important role in the ecology of your home environment that you may not be aware of if you didn’t know they were there.

Studied as a whole, wasps are more than just a pest and provide many different ecological services around your home including parasitism, predation and, most importantly pollination. Put simply, without wasps, you would have many more pests around your home and wouldn’t have access to a wide variety of food sources that they help pollinate. Unfortunately, wasps will often build visible nests they will defend aggressively if they feel threatened.

While there are many different types of wasps that can be found around your home, they all fulfill very distinct roles that would be considered beneficial. For instance, hornets and paper wasps help to minimize insect populations around the home while yellowjackets love for sugar helps them pollinate many beneficial plants. Even more impressive, wasps help transfer yeast from each season’s grapes to fulfill the crop selection needed for bread, beer and wine.