An exuberant and authoritative book puts wasps in their rightful place – at the centre of research, says Simon Ings
Life 25 May 2022
By Simon Ings
A yellow-legged Asian hornet, flying in Jakarta, Indonesia
Lessy Sebastian/EyeEm/Getty Images
Endless Forms: The secret world of wasps
Seirian Sumner
William Collins
“It is almost impossible to walk into a bookshop these days and not bump into a beautiful book about bees,” Seirian Sumner grumbles in her lively and intermittently stomach-churning new book, Endless Forms. The London-based behavioural ecologist has reached “peak bee”. What are bees, anyway, she writes, but wasps that have forgotten how to hunt? The “original bee” was a solitary wasp that turned vegetarian, just as the “first ant” …