This Wasp Nest of Mine, I’m Gonna Let It Shine
On a muggy spring night in 2016, the chemist Bernd Schöllhorn was tromping alone through a forest in northern Vietnam. Into the inky darkness, he raised a black light—and saw an extraordinarily bright shape winking at him in eerie shades of yellowish green.
“I thought it was somebody else,” Schöllhorn, a researcher at the University of Paris, told me. But when he cut his own light, the stranger’s torch instantly extinguished as well. Schöllhorn pushed his way through the vegetation until he reached the source of the glow: a geometric, open-combed nest of a paper-wasp colony.
“It was just incredible,” Schöllhorn recalled. Bathed in ultraviolet rays from, as though prepping for an entomological rave. And he had no idea why.
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