Lying here in the sun, listening to the faint hum of our honeybees come and go, it would be easy to imagine nature as a nice place of friendly and even-tempered harmony. With the help of Disney, it would seem nature is where butterflies flit, deer frolic, and lions share clean jokes with the wildebeest.

When I look over at the honeybee hives though, I see the wasps patrolling in front and am reminded that in reality, nature is as nasty, brutish and amoral as a presidential campaign.

Well, maybe not that bad, but it is a place where morality doesn’t really exist.

The so-called lower animals can’t be blamed for serving their own best interest because they don’t really have the brainspace for ethical considerations. The wasps are there to attack the vulnerable worker bees and will even go into passive hives and eat the young. The concepts of right and wrong don’t enter the picture.

A number of years ago, I was reading under a tree when a large moth fell heavily at my feet and began running back and forth, fluttering wildly. Looking closer, I could see a much smaller hornet clamped to its side, stinging it over and over.

When the moth slowed and eventually stopped, the wasp immediately inserted one jaw into the moth’s backside to cut a tidy L-shaped incision up and across the moth’s abdomen with a surgeon’s precision. It then reached in, cut out the moth’s reproductive organs and flew off.

About two minutes later, the wasp was back to cut off and fly away with the moth’s head. Another two minutes and it returned to very deliberately cut out something from between the moth’s wings. This was not random chewing. It was a little otherworldly to see a small insect perform a task with such precision and apparent forethought.

Reading later, I found the moth’s parts would be chewed up and fed to developing sisters and a few brothers back at the hive and that the wasp had selected the parts of greatest nutritional value. These kinds of wasps also hunt for dead meat, whether mouse, insect or hot dog. I’m sure you’ve noticed them the last couple of weeks frantically searching the grass as the season begins to close off.

I’ve read that when an animal falls over dead, wasps arrive in minutes to hunt the flies that get there about the same time.

We like to think of the big animals running things, but most of what happens in almost any ecosystem is small scale.

The wasps we know commonly as hornets, or yellow-jackets live in communal hives with an egg-laying queen, a bunch of worker sisters and a few drone brothers. Only females can sting, as the stinger is a modified egg depositor.

In that way they’re a lot like my honeybees, but they don’t stockpile honey and they hunt meat instead of pollen to feed their pups. They’re about as closely related to bees as cats are to dogs (which is to say, not very; taxonomically speaking). Interestingly, the individuals of at least some species recognize each other by sight.

The next time you whack a couple hornets off the window, look closely at their faces if they’re not too smashed and you’ll see.

Hornets of particular short temper live in underground nests constructed in old animal burrows, rotted-out tree roots, hollow logs or sometimes in buildings. Some species build beautiful nests in bushes or trees with a kind of paper they make from wood pulp and saliva. Look closely and you can see the slight color variation of each mouthful where it was applied during construction.

Be careful though. Some kinds of paper wasps are mild-mannered, but most hives are about as welcoming as a pepper-sprayed skinhead convention.

Luckily, the nests are one-year affairs. Otherwise hornets would rule the world. Queens are the only ones who overwinter, in some nook or cranny somewhere. Some of you have probably been stung in the winter by beauties sleeping in your woodpile.

Hornets are just as sensitive to the smell of meat as flies, and have been ruining picnics since the early dinosaur days. You can’t blame them. Who doesn’t like a free meal? There are currently thousands of different species of wasp sharing space with us, ranging in size from a giant three-inch solitary wasp in Java and the dreaded two-inch Giant Asian Hornet of Japan all the way down to some Chalcid wasps that are only about as long as the width of a human hair.

There are about 5,000 different kinds Vespid wasps (that we call hornets or yellow-jackets), but the vast majority of wasp species live solitary lives. Some are fantastically brilliant metallic blue or green.

There are plenty of these around here, but you have to pay attention, as most are pretty small. Most wasps are parasitoids who lay their eggs on or in some host insect, usually larvae such as caterpillars.

When the eggs hatch the wasp larvae live, grow and develop inside the unfortunate host before emerging as adult wasps some weeks or months later. It’s a dreadful fate for the caterpillar, but good for the wasp and almost always good for human interests, in that many billions of otherwise harmful pests are eliminated free of charge and chemical free at no cost to you the concerned taxpayer.

There are even solitary wasps called spider hunters. Tarantula hawks in the American Southwest can reach nearly two inches in length and along with the rest of the spider hunters apparently possesses one of the most painful stings on earth. A very brave and/or crazy man wrote a scientific paper a few years back rating insect sting pain of 78 different stinging insects on what is now called the Schmidt Index.

I am not making this up.

On a scale of one to four, the sting of a yellow-jacket only rates a two. The tarantula hawk gets a four, narratively described by Schmidt as “Blinding. Shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath.” If you’re not a meticulous gardener, you may have seen the local varieties of spider hunters nervously flicking their glossy purplish-black selves and iridescent wings around in your flowers or on your dry lawn in search of hairy victims. Some of them have orange-y wings.

Spiders fight and occasionally win the inevitable battles, but usually wind up stung, paralyzed and drug off to a hole or under a rock someplace. Apparently the spider isn’t dead, merely paralyzed, and lives long enough to provide a fresh food supply for the wasp larvae that develop inside it.

Weeks later the young wasps bore holes in the poor spider, crawl out and fly off. (You know, sometimes nature is just so beautifully awful; so breathtakingly strange it makes you shiver.)

Don’t worry, these wasps probably aren’t even aware of your existence, but if you tried to grab one, I’m quite sure it would be glad to send you howling around the yard flapping your hands up and down for the rest of the afternoon. Justin Schmidt would be proud of you, though.

Tom Butler has a degree in zoology from the University of Washington and is a lifelong student of nature. He lives in Port Angeles and can be reached at butlert@olypen.com.