There has been a lot of publicity this year about the absence of wasps in the garden and I suspect many gardeners are feeling rather thankful. However, like much this year, the wasp is almost certainly late in appearing rather than absent.

I have a nest in my roof and there’s a window permanently open in a spare bedroom to allow them to escape – for the wasp is great ally of the gardener for most of the year. He or she pollinates throughout the year and eats pests for a large part of the growing season.

Wasps are not pests therefore: they are effectively meat-eating bees and will carve up caterpillars, even cabbage whites, and other grubs and take them back to their nests.

These are fed to the colony, so in my own garden I rarely suffer from sawflies for instance.

Wasps only start hunting for sugar once the males and fertile females have dispersed from the nest, because they can no longer feed on the sweet secretions produced by the larvae in their colony.

This is when they start to raid your fruit and head for your ice-cream. However if you have plenty of nectar-rich flowers from late-summer onwards they will feed on those instead.

Please don’t resort to a wasp trap: you really do want wasps in your garden to clean up the pests for you. Buglife have a campaign about not swatting the wasp – buglife.org.uk

There are eight species of social wasp in all, but the most often seen is Vespula vulgaris, the common wasp, followed by V. germanica, the German wasp.

Both look very similar, as do the other six species to me, but apparently V. germanica usually flies earlier in the year. In the beginning the large queen, which has overwintered, is solely responsible for building the nest, hunting for food and caring for the young.

Often the first signs can be seen on a wooden gate of fence, which has tiny bits of wood scraped away. Once the first brood of infertile female workers matures the queen devotes herself to egg-laying. The larvae feed mostly on soft-bodied invertebrates, particularly caterpillars and flies, hunted by the adults. The adults feed largely on nectar.

Towards the end of the summer some eggs turn into males and some into fertile females. These fertile females disperse from the nest in late summer and autumn and mate with individuals from other nests. Shortly after this the old queen dies.

, This is when the workers can become a nuisance. Freed from the need to capture prey for the young, they search for other sources of food and they will sting you if you become agitated. The advice is, should you find yourself near a wasps’ nest, to retreat slowly and quietly because sudden movements trigger their defence instincts.

The males die soon afterwards, but the new queens (the fertilised females) fatten themselves up for the winter. They find somewhere secluded to hibernate and the cycle starts again. There are also 260 species of solitary wasp. Some are excellent pollinators, some predate and all play an important role in the garden.

Anyone who has found a wasp’s nest will be amazed by the hexagonal paper cells, built by female workers. This year, one queen started a nest in a wheel-barrow on our drive which happened to have a plank over it. It was finally abandoned after a wet week. However old nests, in drier places, are often used by hoverflies, creatures who mimic wasps.