Bees have long been the darlings of the insect world, but wasps were flying 100 million years earlier, and are just as essential for the biosphere. This book will teach you about wasps that spend their entire lives sealed inside a fig, stinging wasps, wasps that turn cockroaches into living zombies, and how wasps taught us to make paper. It presents a maligned insect in all its diverse, unexpected splendour, a predator and pollinator whose potential to instruct us about our world is limitless.