Just reading this makes me sweat. Aren't hornets - and wasps, to a lesser degree - extremely territorial? How do you deal with one when it find its way inside you house? Not to mention, aren't hornets and wasps natural enemies? I imagine you didn't have the two set their nests near your terrace simultaneously?

I can intellectually process all the facts you wrote, but in my dealing with wasps and hornets, I find it hard to see them as anything than fast-moving balls of pain, always ready to strike at you out of nowhere, when you least expect them. Also, as a relatively fresh parent, as a threat to my children. I tend to prefer dealing with them by installing mosquito nets in all windows, but if a hornet gets in and doesn't politely leave, it's makeshift flamethrower time.

When eating outdoor in the summer requires you to swat away the same wasps from your plate over and over again, it's definitely annoying. I was stung as a kid for no reason, it was a pain for me and my parents to deal with. My wife and kid were stung also by wasps they could not see.

We get rid of termites and insects by fumigating entire buildings. I don't see anything wrong with doing that to wasps as well. After all, in all likelihood, wasps will vastly outlive the human species...

So they have a law on the books that isn't really enforced?

That's almost worse imo.

So what I said is true. "Up to" does not say anything about the typical amount.

Your fact check article is also only partially relevant as it addresses the sensationalist claim that these fines apply to killing a wasp but the conversation was about a wasps nest.

The article also states that these maximum fines exist but that even the very low fines that have been handed out only happen very rarely. In other words: the laws exist but they're applied so rarely as to be effectively meaningless (which is true not just for wasps but for animal cruelty in general). That doesn't disagree with what I said though.

Without the wasps crawling into the sugar dispensers at every single outdoor café in Germany all summer long, people would eat the sugar and create a diabetes epidemic.

At least that was my impression in Berlin; wasps got all the sugar, Berliners stayed pretty thin for the most part.

I'll add my own annecdote to this article. We had a wasp nest under the eaves of the house and I managed to successfully move them into a little hutch I built near the garden. I can't say I directly observed them saving the tomatoes, but we did have fewer tomato hornworms than in previous years.

They were also really docile and tolerated a good deal of me fumbling around with the nest. I waited until it was cold out and covered up pretty thouroghly, but they were mostly content to let me flop them around with a set of long BBQ tongs.

Despite their aggression and desire for sugar, wasps are useful and important pollinators the same way that bees are.

Germany has some very silly laws.

The wasp protection one gets broken all the time for obvious reasons.

See https://www.thoughtco.com/what-good-are-wasps-1968081

I've come around on wasps. They just do their thing. You got stung? Don't tread on them.

Very ignorant! One can avoid wasps initially, or also later move them more peacefully. They are very important pollinators (we lack more&more) and even have more cool duties. Not sure about your wasps over there, the annoyance factor of the wasps in Germany is usually heavily overdramatized and human arrogance at its best.

Average human in the middle of a massive, probably partially man made, extinction: "lmao I don't like them let's kill them"

Maybe it is just British wasps? https://www.mjbpestcontrol.co.uk/news/how-do-you-know-if-a-w....