Who here likes wasps? I know I don’t… but I also can’t dislike
them, because without wasps where would we be? In a world of less painful
summers, true, but also a world of less quaffable wine.
It’s a fact that plenty of people have written about, but
nobody seems to talk about: wasps are key to wine production, and without the
little caution-coloured critters we couldn’t enjoy our glass nearly as much.
Saccharomyces cereviciae is a fungus used in the production of plenty of
consumables, including wine and beer, usually referred to as Brewers Yeast.
Brewers Yeast is found growing on fruit like grapes in the summer, particularly
towards the end of the season, but it’s delicate – if the temperature drops too
low, it will die off and never revive. That’s where our testy little friends
come in; they love grapes, so when the fruits ripen the wasps move in. The
little guys eat up as much ripe fruit as they can, ingesting S. cereviciae in
the process, before taking their spoils back home to feed the children. So now,
the yeast has a new home for the winter: the bellies of their
yellow-and-black-striped buddies. However, the adult wasps only give the yeast
a way to survive the cold seasons, not a way to return to its former glory in
the coming summer – which is where the larvae take over. Having been fed on the
lovely ripe fruit by their elders, the yeast present is sent further down the
line to survive and thrive in a younger model, before the new generation of
wasps flies out and brings the yeast back to the budding fruit in the new year.
Irene Stefanini and Leonardo Dapporto of the University of
Florence decided to research this phenomenon, capturing female wasps during
each growing season and before their winter hibernation, the most obvious and
impressive example of the phenomenon being after the females were fed a strain
of yeast which glowed in the dark. After their hibernation, the yeast was still
visibly glowing within the wasps – and in their larvae too, who hadn’t been fed
by the scientists. Following their study, the pair wrote that wasps “can
maintain a potentially unending transmission of yeast strains.”
So, there you have it. Without wasps, we
wouldn’t be able to enjoy our beer, bread or (some may say most importantly)
wine in the same way – and I for one am eternally grateful!