Every December, just as the Alexandra Palace stage lights warm up and the first stray Walking in a Winter Wonderland breaks out, a wasp (or, if you prefer the folklore, the wasp) materialises in the broadcast like it’s been on the PDC payroll for years.
The boring answer is that it’s never “the same” individual – most adult social wasps don’t have the kind of lifespan that accommodates annual festive television commitments – but the fun part is that Ally Pally is an accidentally excellent wasp magnet once you zoom in on the biology, the building physics, and the microclimate engineering created by humans who really, really like pints and tungsten.
Start with the insect: the “December wasp” is most plausibly a queen or a late-season worker of a common social vespid. Temperate-climate vespids run on a seasonally gated endocrine clock: photoperiod and temperature drive shifts in juvenile hormone and ecdysteroid signalling, which in turn dictate whether the colony remains in production mode or collapses into overwintering strategy. By late autumn, workers are essentially on borrowed time, while newly produced queens enter diapause – a hormonally mediated metabolic downshift involving suppressed reproduction, reduced activity, and enhanced cryoprotection. That diapause is not a coma; it’s a plastic state that can be interrupted if the insect experiences a sufficiently “spring-like” thermal and olfactory environment.
And that’s where Alexandra Palace becomes less a venue and more a biological lure. The arena is a giant, intermittently heated cavity with strong thermal stratification: warm air layers accumulate high, cooler air sinks, and convection plumes form above any dense assembly of humans. Add stage lighting rigs, screens, spotlights, and broadcast equipment dumping heat, and you generate localised thermal islands – patches of air that sit several degrees above ambient. For a wasp operating on temperature thresholds, those microhabitats can function like false positives for “it’s safe to fly.” If a queen has been overwintering in a crevice, loft space, wall void, or timber joint within the building envelope, a few consecutive evenings of heating plus radiant light can nudge her out of diapause and into exploratory flight.
Then layer in the chemical ecology. Wasps don’t just chase “light” like a cartoon; they navigate a world of volatiles. A packed darts crowd emits a complex aerosol of carbon dioxide, ethanol vapour, skin lipids, deodorants, food aromatics, and sugary drink headspace compounds. Ethanol and simple carbohydrate volatiles can be especially salient because adult wasps rely heavily on carbohydrates for flight energy.
Even when it’s cold outside, the interior becomes a persistent plume source: warm air carries these odours upwards toward lights and rafters, exactly where a disoriented, newly active wasp is likely to end up. In effect, the building runs a nightly chemo-thermal beacon: heat says spring, odour says food, and high-contrast lighting provides a navigational trap, pulling the insect into open airspace where the cameras can catch it doing laps like it’s searching for a double top.
Finally, there’s probability and architecture. Ally Pally is old, porous, and full of microcavities – perfect overwintering niches. If even a tiny number of queens choose those niches each autumn, the “annual wasp” stops being mystical and becomes inevitable. You don’t need one immortal wasp; you need a venue that reliably shelters overwintering individuals and then reliably provides mid-winter activation cues.
December after December, the tournament delivers the same environmental recipe, and biology does the rest: diapause interrupted, orientation disrupted, carbohydrate-seeking flight initiated, and a baffled vespid promoted to minor celebrity by the nearest TV lens.
So there you have it. You’re welcome. For one brief, bewildering moment, the darts world took a detour into the insect kingdom as well – purely in the name of scientific curiosity and, of course, diversity.
——ENDS—–
Images: Darts Behind the OCHE
