You can thank wasps for your bread, beer and wine

If wasps didn’t exist, picnics would be a lot more fun. But the next time you find yourself trying to dodge a flying, jam-seeking harpoon, think about this: without wasps, many of your ingredients might not exist at all. Irene Stefanini and Leonardo Dapporto from the University of Florence have found that the guts of wasps provide a safe winter refuge for yeast – specifically Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the fungus we use to make wine, beer and bread. And without those, picnics would be a lot less fun. S.cerevisiase has been our companion for at least 9,000 years, not just as a tool of baking and brewing, but as a doyen of modern genetics. It has helped us to make tremendous scientific progress and drink ourselves into stupors, possibly at the same time. But despite its significance, we know very little about where the yeast came from, or how it lives ...