Publisher's Synopsis
In this eye-opening and entertaining work of popular science in the spirit of The Mosquito, Entangled Life, and The Book of Eels, a leading behavioral ecologist transforms our understanding of wasps, exploring these much-maligned insects' secret world, their incredible diversity and complex social lives, and revealing how they hold our fragile ecosystem in balance. Wasps get a bad rap, but there may no other earthly creature guarding so many undiscovered wonders. Wasps are the bees' evolutionary ancestors - and are just as essential for the survival of our environment. Wasps taught us how to make paper, and their sophisticated social networks are the best model we have for earth's major evolutionary transitions. The author shows that in their understudied biology are clues to progressing medicine, including a possible cure for cancer. Their secrets have gone mostly untapped - but the potential of the wasp, and the form it takes, is endl
