In 2017, #WaspLove was at an all-time low: people hated them. We realised this mis-placed hatred was because of a lack of opportunities to interact (safely) with wasps, and understand why they matter in nature and for people. We set up the Big Wasp Survey as a citizen science project, to get people involved with learning about wasps.
We were told to expect a flop…
In the first year, over 2000 people across the UK took part (our website broke!).
In 2018 it was even bigger….(our website broke!)
By 2019 we had to cap the number of participants (for the sanity of our web-guy, Cris!).
We simply couldn’t believe the enthusiasm that the UK public had for wasps! Along with wasp samples came personal accounts of people’s observations, thoughts and emotions. We realised that people really don’t (all) hate wasps: they just needed a chance to get to know them.
Then came the pandemic. We could no longer receive wasp samples. Instead, we asked our samplers to identify their wasps at home using a set of videos we made. We tested how well they did: 96% of wasps were identified accurately. Amazing! This became the new norm for BWS. From 2020-2025, our samplers identified their own wasp catch and submitted their records.
10 years, 1000s of citizen scientists and 10,000s of wasps later, it’s time to hang up our wasp traps for the last time…. at least for now. We need to sit back with the data and see what it tells us.
2026 will be the last year for BWS. We’ve had a blast! The data occupied dozens of undergraduate and masters students at UCL and University of Gloucester; and have already yielded several publications on diversity and distributions of wasps, unloved insects, genetics, citizen science; they even sparked a radio series. There are more BWS papers and goodies cooking in the pot!
We would like to thank all our citizen scientists for contributing their time, care and energy to our crazy project. There would be no BWS without you!
Why We Need the Big Wasp Survey
The Big Wasp Survey is a citizen science project that was set up in the UK in 2017 by Prof Adam Hart (University of Gloucestershire) and Prof Seirian Sumner (UCL). The aim was to engage the public in a project that tackled the negative attitudes people have towards wasps and improved our understanding of wasp biology, diversity, and distributions across the UK. Although we had big ambitions for the Big Wasp Survey, we weren’t really sure how it would all pan out. But the enthusiasm of so many citizen scientists and the spread of #wasplove across the late summer meant
our ambitions were exceeded!
Unlike honeybees, social wasps are little studied, and the important ecosystem services they provide – as natural predators that regulate populations of other insects and arthropods – is largely unappreciated. The Big Wasp Survey asked members of the public to make a simple wasp trap, hang it in their garden for seven days, and then send in the trap contents to the scientists so that the wasps could be identified.
Why Killing the Wasps is Necessary and Ok
Wasps are difficult to identify to species level without killing them; it takes a good hand-lens or microscope and a trained eye to distinguish even the nine species we find in the UK. However, the Big Wasp Survey is designed to minimise impact on wasp populations: it is timed so that it attracts
only workers – indeed, we have not found a single queen among the thousands of wasps that have now been processed. The traps do not attract males. You can read more about the issues around lethal sampling of insects here and here, or listen to Prof Hart’s Radio 4 programme here
Big Wasp Survey Generates High Quality Data on Wasp Distributions
Thanks to everyone’s help, and to some serious wasp sorting over the winter, we were able to publish the first BWS scientific paper in the journal Insect Conservation and Diversity. The main findings are summarised below (apologies – we couldn’t afford the open access fees for the journal).
The 2017 survey ran from 26th August to 10th Sept; 2377 people registered to take part, and 54.4% (1294) of these people submitted their results. Of these, 551 traps (42.5%) contained wasps, representing 548 postcodes across the UK; 6680 wasps could be identified to species level; a further 180 wasps from 39 traps were too damaged to identify.
Three species dominated: the common yellowjacket wasp Vespula vulgaris accounted for 44% of wasps (2942 wasps in 407 traps); the German yellowjacket wasp Vespula germanica accounted for a further 44%. (2974 wasps in 251 traps); and the European hornet Vespa crabro accounted for 6% of the sample (395 wasps in 100 traps) (see Fig 1). We also detected small number of Vespula rufa (2 in 2 traps) and Dolichovespula media (9 wasps in 6 traps).
By comparing with a long-term dataset of the same species collected by members of the Bees, Wasps and Ants Recording Scheme (BWARS), we were able to show that the quality of the data being generated by the Big Wasp Survey is excellent. It is less spatially biased than BWARS data
(meaning that Big Wasp Survey is sampling wasps more evenly across the UK), and the species distribution maps obtained from just two weeks Big Wasp Survey sampling generated similar maps to the long-term dataset, suggesting that our data make biological sense.