Writing with the Fairy Wasps

The destructive little creatures who keep the stories intact

Soon you’ll be able to buy a sachet full of wasps, so tiny you’d never, normally, notice them. You will be able to put them to work for you the way we have utilized so  many animals, from dogs to mules, from dolphins to other humans.

The same but different. The same.

My friend Richard sent me an article about how fairy wasps are going to be used to control moths in museums.¹ The name Fairy Wasp isn’t necessarily inspired by the Disney kind of fairy but might be more like the faeries of Tam Lin² and other folktales: Dangerous. Deadly. It’s just a matter of staging and perspective. I’ve always been fascinated by how nature documentaries can turn the point of view—and our sympathy—from wildebeest to lioness with a bit of music and lingering close-ups—a mewing cub or two under a bush somewhere. It's odd how our feelings of kinship can be so easily manipulated.

A lot of the images we use to scare ourselves are recognisable under the microscopic, or in the out-of-our-reach-realms of the world: in parallel worlds. The inside of a murder hornet’s nest bears a striking resemblance to the inside of the alien mothership in the film Independence Day. I have no idea if this is a coincidence. It is the kind of thing that makes you wonder if we have subconscious knowledge of the worlds we can’t perceive. There are things we don’t consciously acknowledge that we know.

Fairy wasps are a group of tiny, parasitoid wasps that lay their eggs inside the eggs of other invertebrates. Moths, in this instance. The parasitic eggs may outnumber the host egg by 100 to 1. And maybe that’s why journalists write about these wasps with such bias: “dastardly”, “devious”, “malignant life”…³ (What does “malignant life” even mean? Isn’t anything with a metabolism malignant to something?)

Maybe we gravitate towards nature’s underdogs because we mistakenly view ourselves as one. The moth, as the unwilling host, is the underdog. The fairy wasp, the antagonist in the story we write.

But the article Richard sent me explains that one species of fairy wasp is going to be sold in small sachets to be set out in cupboards and closets. The insects will hatch and leave the sachet looking for moths. This is how they’ll protect the inventory of some museums. Until now, these museums relied on poisons.

Wasps as good fairies.

There is a poetry here that I am trying to unravel, or weave, or both. While moths work to deconstruct the past that we have so carefully archived, people are attempting to conscript wasps to serve as guardians of our past. More accurately, they’ll be the guardians of our constructed past. Neither of these things has anything to do with the truth, by the way.

If moths are the harbingers of entropy, fairy wasps, with their grotesque nature, conjure ghosts of our future.

That is, the future’s perspective of what was.

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I’ve always thought sachet was a pretty word. A word that smells of lavender and old books. Now it will buzz forever in my mind, vibrating with a new dimension: still pretty, just far less ornamental—like a lover become the spouse. Welcome, welcome to my house, says the queen. This is the museum of if/then and dreams, where we admit history is told now to then as best we can, assembling remnants from empty cells.

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The wonderful writer J. Daly sent me another article. This one is about how few social wasps there are in the UK this year, about how we don’t know if this is a natural waning between waxings, or an indication that the wasps are dying out.⁴ Ironically, it is the exterminators who notice the drop in calls that makes us aware of the situation.

Fewer wasps means fewer crops for harvesting. Forget the canary in the coal mine: the bees, wasps, beetles, and the crickets are dying. We need to pay attention, and reconsider our perspectives.

I miss crickets. Summer in Norway isn’t at all what summer was in Kentucky. There’s no wet heat, and there’s no singing in the grass. I’ve thought about the fact that, half a world away right now, crickets are singing in the bluegrass. Please tell me they still are.

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Thank you for taking the time to read/listen to my process journal! I’ll be back on Wednesday with a new old poem.

Until then, have a great couple of days!

Warmly,

Ren Powell’s Acts of a Recovering Drama Queen
Writing against Melodrama by Engaging with the Natural World
Give some love. It only takes a little ❤️.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/15/minuscule-wasps-enlisted-to-fight-off-moths-in-new-pest-control-strategy

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3. https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/insects-invertebrates/fairy-wasp

4. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c134621devzo