To recap, a botanical taxonomist called to draw attention to what he called my "little f**k up" in getting wrong the identification of a flower in a photograph we had published.

But your little "f**k up", he went on to console me, was as nothing compared with the "huge f**k up" the Royal Australian Mint had made in 2011-2012 when issuing some important commemorative coins. The mint's coins were supposedly decorated with designs of the Flanders poppy (of enormous WW1 significance, of course), but they had "f***ed" up very badly, the taxonomist seethed, in portraying instead a kind of anemone, a plant of a different genus.

We were grateful for this information (we owned up at once, in the next column, to our own little f**k up), while wondering if all botanical taxonomists talk like that.

Now entomologist and wasp authority Dr Philip Spradbery contacts us to say "Your little f**k up in the naming of the flower species from Kosciuszko is probably not as grievous as the stuff up on the recent Australia Post stamp series, Things That Sting. Although the Flanders Poppy coin f**k up does win the contest."

"But one of the subjects in the stamp series is the European wasp, Vespula germanica, the scourge of Canberra that I can legitimately claim to be the world expert about.

"But the depiction on the stamp is of the wrong species, for goodness sake. It shows a Vespula sylvestris, which is not even found in Australia. I have written to the Philatelic Section of Australia Post recently but have not yet received a reply."

Dr Spradbery, who has been probing, investigating, talking about and fighting Canberra's wasps for decades, sends us a page from his authoritative wasp book (1973) with the different species detailed. What's more, he has sent us (pictured) two images of the stamp, with one, the lower one, corrected by him (some black specks added to its face) to make it an authentic Vespula germanica.

Actually, while we are sure the difference between Vespula germanica and Vespula sylvestris stick out like dog's b***s to an expert like Dr Spradbery, they do look eerily similar to us. We will grudgingly forgive Australia Post, as long as it owns up to its error.

Growing up in England, there was never a seaside summer when we urchins were not stung at least once by a Vespula germanica (European wasp). Dr Spradbery advises that he did his PhD on wasps in wasp-infested England "at England's oldest agricultural research institute, Rothamsted Experimental Station, in the early 1960s".

In our English seaside summers of the 1950s and 1960s wasps were everywhere, and seemed to hang about whenever one was eating or drinking anything remotely wet and sugary. That they should have followed me to Australia, to Canberra (they seem to have been unknown here when I migrated) has always seemed spiteful. They were one of the several English things (another was the insufferable royal family and another was insufferable Rolf Harris wobbling his wobbleboard on every second show on English TV) I migrated to get away from.

The sting was sensationally painful. I can still feel it. Our mums' domestic treatment for it was to dab the stung place with a "blue bag", attractively tattooing us with blobs of blue. We thought the blue bag was a prescribed cure for stings but it turns out to have been a muslin bag of laundry bluing or blue, which in the old days was stirred around in the final rinse. Made of synthetic ultramarine and baking soda, it imparted a yellowness-banishing whiter-than-whiteness to household linen.

Quite why the blue bag worked like magic on relieving the agony of wasp stings is not clear but my memory of them is that they were a miracle cure. Perhaps, subconsciously, we sobbing urchins were consoled by the magical motherly love we were shown while our mothers were treating us.

Vespula germanica is not welcome here (thank goodness we have Dr Spradbery to fight them) but no creature is more welcome here in the ACT than Callocephalon fimbriatum, our faunal emblem the Gang-gang cockatoo.

Here is a new photograph of one, a male, by Andrew Gleeson, who has been watching it dining in a neighbour's hawthorn. Note the berry in the bird's bill.

The Gang-gang's bill looks like a heavy-duty brute of a tradies' tool but when you watch a Gang-gang using it, with, say, hawthorn berries, it uses it (and its tongue) with exquisite dexterity to peel the berry so as to find the seed within. And this is part of a wider hawthorn-based rigmarole, as described by one observer in Volume 4 of the Handbook of Australian New Zealand & Antarctic Birds, the bible of Australasian ornithology. Gang-gangs prove to be, like so many great Australians (Rod Laver, Alan Border, the list goes on) left-handed.

"When feeding on berries of the hawthorn, it picks individual berries off bush with bill and passes them, without exception, to upraised left foot; keeps foot raised and holding berries [while it eats]."