Oh I like wasps in general, just not when they gang up on me and go for my face
One year we had a wasps nest in a gooseberry bush, one of a row. We had had bad sawfly larvae damage in the previous years, but the wasps dealt with the problem totally and even now although the sawfly are back it's in smaller numbers. We had no crop that year as I wasn't going to disturb the wasps, but after that crops were wonderful, no sawfly larvae.
Wasps are also great at finding caterpillars in the growing veg and carrying them back to their larvae in the nest. They search while flying in a real quartering pattern which I find most impressive. Not just caterpillars but various other pests. Wasps also hate flies and kill them.
Then there's those lovely paper nests, including the little ones you describe. They get the wood to make the paper by chewing on old unpainted woodwork like shed doors and tree stumps. If you listen you can hear them rasping away with their horizontal jaws. They use this to fabricate those nests, paperthin layer by paperthin layer. Amazing.
Every creature has a place and a reason. It's the interface with humans which can end up being a nuisance.
My husband says the other nests are totally calm today, no aggression, so I don't really blame the little wasps for getting angry when they got whacked. It would have done my grandson good if he had been stung instead of all the rest of us
The actual nest looked pretty much like a normal yellowjacket wasps nest, built between the slats of a pallet. It's the same paper as the tiny nests, which I think are solitary wasps, but bigger, smaller perhaps than a yellowjacket which can be as big as a football. I didn't actually go near enough to look carefully at it
so this is second hand knowledge. I suspect the little wasps are not naturally more aggressive than large ones, just they were very very angry. They did attack in a pack though and chased me more than 100yds (on my scoot
; I couldn't have outrun them)
My brother thought they might be a 'German wasp' but I've no idea what he's referencing.
My son told me about German cockroaches (which are of course not called German in Germany) which at certain times fly across the Channel and come into the houses where he lives in Hampshire. Cockroaches will ultimately inherit the Earth!