England has some nice wasps too, I'll admit it

My PhD has been a series of wasp-hunting forays through French Guiana, Panama, and Brazil - and people sometimes seem a bit surprised at all this South American wasping. "Surely," they say, "there are perfectly good wasps in the UK?" Whilst my wasping loyalties are definitely with the wasps of South America - from the night-dwelling Apoica​ in the rainforest to the spectacular armadillo wasps of the cerrado - it's true that British wasps aren't to be sniffed at. After all, we have hornets, and even devoted wasp-killing maniacs will concede that they are fairly impressive.

So, to correct the balance a little bit, here are some shots of British wasps (hornets, no less...) from a park in London, which we collected this week for a three-year project being undertaken Daisy (a postdoc in the Sumner lab, probing the very origins of sociality in the wasp world...):