Endless Forms review: Let’s hear it for wasps, says a lively new book

An exuberant and authoritative book puts wasps in their rightful place – at the centre of research, says Simon Ings

By Simon Ings

“It is almost impossible to walk into a bookshop these days and not bump into a beautiful book about bees,” Seirian Sumner grumbles in her lively and intermittently stomach-churning new book, Endless Forms. The London-based behavioural ecologist has reached “peak bee”. What are bees, anyway, she writes, but wasps that have forgotten how to hunt? The “original bee” was a solitary wasp that turned vegetarian, just as the “first ant” …