What do wasps do, anyway?

What purpose do wasps serve?

A few are flying around the whole garden but they're not interested in flowers. If they go into a flower then it's purely by accident. They go leaf to leaf to leaf. What are they doing?

* Wasps are predatory insects that spend a lot of time hunting smaller insects to feed to their larvae. The wasp prey is chewed into smaller bits and taken back to the nest and fed to the young wasps larvae that turn the exoskeletons of prey insects into a sugary solution which they feed back to the adult wasps.

Although difficult to determine the exact number of insects that are killed by a wasp colony through a summer, it's been suggested that a single wasp nest will catch approximately five metric tons of insects in one year.

R-i-i-i-g-h-t. In your wasp-dreams.

I don't like this answer. Let's look somewhere else.

What Good are Wasps?

The site has a good video that I don't see on YouTube.
* wasps deliver yeast to wine grapes
* wasps eat other insects
* yellow jackets are dead bug cleanup crew

* Hornets and paper wasps prey on other insects.
* Paper wasps carry caterpillars and leaf beetle larvae back to their nests to feed their young.
* Hornets give their nests all kinds of live insects.

But sometimes the cost of wasps far outweighs the benefits. New Zealand is given as example for an invasive species of wasps killing their honey bees.

Conclusion: wasps do some good but you should probably kill them.

Come to think of it, there is a very low insect population out there.