WHAT is the point of wasps? I bet that that is top of most people’s wildlife FAQs, especially every autumn when wasps, bold as brass, suddenly seem to be everywhere.

Taken literally, it’s a very easy question to answer. In the process of evolution, there isn’t any point to wasps, or anything else for that matter. In the survival of the fittest, it’s simply a matter of whatever is, is whatever works. And being a wasp most definitely works.

They are one of the most successful types of animal on the planet. In Britain alone there are over 200 species.

Many are tiny, solitary creatures, which you might not recognise as wasps, or even notice at all. Others are extremely attractive, like the Ruby-tailed wasps, metallic jewels that search out little holes in the old mortar on walls, where cuckoo-like they lay their eggs in the nests of other wasps.

What they all have in common, what makes a wasp a wasp, is the narrow constriction between the chest and abdomen, the original “wasp waist” and, more pertinently for us, that the egg-laying tube, the ovipositor, has been converted into a sting.

The sting is used to paralyse other small insects, which are then taken as living food for the wasp’s young. One group of wasps has even taken to hunting large spiders. In this invertebrate version of “King Kong vs Godzilla” you would probably put money on the spider to win but in actual fact the spider is usually paralysed, as if with fear, merely at the approach of the wasp.

Stingers they may all be but very few of them are going to sting us, so what the question is really asking is; “What about those black and yellow ones; the bolshie ones that don’t seem to realise that humans are the most important things on the planet and defy us to even waft them away. Is there a good side to them?”

These are the social wasps, so strikingly marked that you don’t need to be a biologist to know that you aren’t meant to mess with them.

There are around ten species of these social wasps in Britain and unlike Bumblebees, which are most easily identified by the colour of their bums, you tell wasps apart by the look on their faces.

The Common Wasp has a distinct anchor mark on its face, making it look like a cartoon “Mr Angry”, whereas the Tree Wasp just has a single dot. One wasp has a triangle of dots, like the shorthand abbreviation for “therefore”; therefore it can be identified as a German wasp.

I expect that most people are never going to get close enough to look a wasp in the face but there’s one species that you can tell, if not a mile off, then certainly across the garden.

This is the hornet, a giant social wasp marked in orange and brown rather than the typical yellow and black. Hornets are a southern species, associated mainly with woodland but last year a friend of mine found one near Whitby so they may well be heading our way.

The good news is that in spite of their imposing appearance, they aren’t actually any more dangerous than “normal” wasps and usually aren’t aggressive unless aggravated.

As their name suggests, the social wasps occur in large colonies and at its peak a nest can house several thousand adults and larvae. The nest itself is an amazing feat of architecture. Formed of concentric rings of hexagonal cells around a central column it can get to the size of a football yet is just made by the wasps chewing wood and mixing it with their saliva to form a sort of paper mache. It is started afresh each year by a queen, the only wasp from the previous year’s colonies to survive the winter.

In full production the nest contains hundreds of larvae and it’s at this stage that wasps do, do us good, as the workers collect myriads of aphids and caterpillars to feed the larvae.

In return, the workers get a drop of sugary-liquid and this combination of hard work and sugar-fixes means that they are less likely bother to us, though that isn’t to say that they wont take a pop at your pop if the opportunity arises. However at the end of summer the situation changes as there are fewer larvae to feed and the workers must satisfy their sweet tooth elsewhere.

This is compounded in autumn when the new queen flies off to find somewhere to hibernate, leaving all the other wasps to die and the nest to be abandoned. It's tempting to think that the workers all go on a final binge, getting drunk on fermenting fruit and stinging just for the hell of it, but in reality they are probably just desperate for sugar.

A single wasp sting, though extremely painful, is unlikely to do much harm unless you are allergic to them, but an angry swarm is a different matter.

Once while out doing a bat survey, I came across curious hole in the ground in the middle of a path. For no reason that I can think of other than that it was the size of my foot, I put my foot into it.

No sooner had I turned and asked my colleagues what the strange buzzing noise was, than they had turned and started running. In spite of our 100m dash in the dark, we still managed to get stung several times.

Apparently each year there is a prize, called the Darwin Award, for the person who is removed from the gene pool by dying in the most stupid fashion. I could have been a contender. I wonder if those wasps thought: “What is the point of humans?”