do you have any thoughts on wasp stings? I got stung at work (garden center) yesterday and I could tell the little guy was being gentle with me. I'm very very in tune with my body and the way my arm felt afterwards was nearly identical to how it felt after a tetanus shot, as in, I could feel the injection spread up my arm slowly and cause some stiffness, stop at my shoulder and then move on into my whole system a couple hours later. Felt different than other vaccines, almost like I could feel it was bacterial based. I am trying to research wasp venom and have found some interesting stuff about what all is in it. There's the stuff that cause allergic reactions, and a lot of enzymes and peptides etc that break down your cell walls(!!!!) to allow the venom to spread (this is what is being researched for cancer treatment potential!!!). There's a paralytic which causes the stiffness and something that causes pain. There's also something called wasp kinin which I am struggling to understand, but seems like a specific goo that wasps produce that varies widely from species to species and even individual to individual. There's also lots of other "biologically active" substances that include antimicrobial stuff and antifungal stuff. My woowoo theory is that venom could be hyper specific to whatever chemicals the wasp interacts with in its environment regularly, and that wasps that have developed resistance to insecticides may have more painful stings (I think this is the case for fire ants, too), or the potential for their venom to function as a sort of ~vaccine~. But against what, I don't know, maybe the chemicals present in their environment like neurotoxins in insecticides that can also hurt people. I have this theory about ticks too. Surely there is some ecosystem service that puncturing and injection performs? Like with ticks most diseases arent passed on until the tick has been attached for a few hours, but surely they are passing Something at the moment of puncture. Could animals benefit from sharing a concoction fermented inside the insect and sourced from many other animals? Like an ecosystem sourdough?? And with vespid stings, obviously getting stung repeatedly or deeply increases the dose and risk, but if there's Good Stuff contained in the venom, could a small dose actually be good for you?? I have a friend who is a first gen Mexican immigrant and he says that bee venom is really good for pain relief and picked up a dead bee and injected himself with the stinger to relieve back pain, so I know anecdotally there are some cultural practices that support this theory. The basic googling I normally do to find studies about stuff is challenging for wasps because the internet is full of a ton of anti wasp propaganda from pest control companies and research seems to be specific to each component of the venom rather than the entire mixture as a whole, and each species is different so its hard to extrapolate. I can't seem to find a full list of Ingredients of wasp venom either. Have you ever looked into this? As a fellow wasp supporter I am very curious about your thoughts! Also, we have a huge powdery mildew outbreak at work currently and the wasps have been alllllll over the plants with it, which ive also observed in my native garden at home. Have you noticed anything like that in your garden? My guess is that mildew is a sign that there might be more aphids or slugs around and so they are hunting but I also wonder about if they actually like or use the mildew itself somehow. Much to consider.
There's a book you might like called Venomous by Christie Wilcox. It's amazing.
Basically, venom is insanely complex. It's not just a toxic substance, even the simplest venom has dozens of different components specially adapted to mess with your cells in some way. "Poison" is just something that hurts you, "venom" is a highly sophisticated bioweapon.
The reason for this complexity is evolutionary: it's easy for a species to evolve immunity to just one of the components in venom, so the species has to evolve lots and lots of new components to outpace the evolution of resistance.
You're right on the money with medical applications. Venom is an incredible source of potential drugs because it has so many different components.
I can't recommend that venom straight from the bug be used for medicinal applications, since, as I just said, there are dozens or even hundreds of different components in there that affect you in all different ways, but yes, people have intentionally stung themselves with bees to self-treat chronic pain and stuff.
Venom can also have weird effects on your immune system and your body overall that we don't understand anything about. Lots of anecdotes of people saying they were cured of their this-or-that after being stung by a bunch of bees.
There is probably some truth to it because venom is full of stuff that evolved specifically to affect your cells, and it's not that weird to suppose that occasionally that effect could be a positive one. But it seems equally plausible that other people have gotten mysterious ailments from venom too, for the exact same reasons.
Worth noting that the more bee stings you have in your life, the more likely you are to develop an allergy to bee venom. So watch out!
Yes, when a tick bites you, its saliva gets in your body which is how Alpha-gal happens: with lone star tick there is a component in the saliva which your body can have an immune reaction to, causing you to become allergic (sometimes anaphylactic level allergy) to red meat.
Which is similar to a vaccine, superficially, it's causing your body to recognize something as a threat and have an immune response to it. It's just not beneficial to you and is in fact quite harmful.
Ticks perform the ecosystem service of redistributing nutrients from larger organisms into smaller ones. A tick bites a large animal, takes some of its blood, falls off, and can then be eaten by a smaller animal. It's almost like the food chain moves "backwards", where nutrients flow from larger organisms into smaller ones.
It's actually really cool, how a deer can become food for spiders and ants and wasps and lizards through being bitten by a tick and that tick being eaten by a much smaller creature.
As for the behaviors of wasps and why they might be attracted to the powdery mildew, who knows? Fungi, insects, and plants all communicate with each other in complex ways. Here's a couple papers suggesting that powdery mildew has an effect on wasps, but weirdly, the effect in these papers is opposite: parasitoid wasps are less attracted to plants with powdery mildew, possibly because the powdery mildew affects the plant's ability to release chemicals to attract wasps to parasitize caterpillars eating them.
You could try identifying the wasps, at least on a general level, and investigate further. It's worth keeping a little journal to record your observations of interactions between organisms.
I took a beekeeping class a while back and honeybees are SO well studied, like there are THOUSANDS of papers on them, and yet, there is still SO much we do not know about honeybees. And there are thousands of other social insects that have few or even NO papers on them. The amount we don't know about wasps is probably absolutely mind-boggling.
Fact is, insects that are not "economically important" are barely studied at all, even though many fascinating secrets lie within their biology and ecology.
These are good questions and they are worth investigating. It's just that nature is so ridiculously complicated we are nowhere near understanding the basics of it.
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