Dr says European wasps and later Asian paper wasps probably arrived on cargo at the airport and from there built nests nearby at Pialligo. He has a small cardboard box full of about 30 of the first Asian wasps skewed on pins after capturing them at Pialligo on March 26, 2010.

While collecting specimens for a Japanese colleague's genetics study, he was astonished to have found a nest in Holt and another in Amaroo. "How they get around I don't know, these are huge distances, Pialligo to Amaroo is monstrous [distance], " he says.

Warnings on European wasps are well documented from Dr Spradbery, an entomologist who sits by a wasp awareness hotline in his Yarralumla home's laboratory. Last week he recorded 40 new nests across Canberra. One day in a previous season he fielded 63 calls.

Now Asian wasp numbers are exploding. The scientists says in New Zealand where they were introduced decades ago, they are listed as the number one pest problem.

"Numbers are increasing but what is more interesting and threatening is the distribution, it is spreading alarmingly. If it was all contained in Pialligo, and numbers were building up and up and up, and you had the odd ones in Fyshwick, [that could be contained]. But this one has gone swoosh, it is all over the shop."

Dr Spradbery has researched insects in many parts of the world. He says wasps are as troublesome as Queensland's fire ants which, despite enormous government expenditure, have spread to Sydney. As with wasps, wiping out nests is never enough.

"I have always said if I had all the resources of the Defence Force at my command to eradicate European wasps from Canberra, all the soldiers, sailors, airmen, every body, to search, hunt and destroy, you still wouldn't win. Because there would be at least one wasp nest somewhere in the bush which escaped detection and bingo, it produced one, two three thousand queens and one or two thousand potential nests."

Biological control would be more effective and less dramatic in the long term. So he continues experimenting. Observing wasps in perforated glass cubicles, he is trying to discover what chemical queens produce that keeps other wasps sterile.

"How the queen can stop others from developing their ovaries? If we know what it is, we could use it as an insect growth regulator, which would have enormous impact actually," Dr Spradbery says.

He started 20 years ago. He's testing chemicals, solvent mixtures and refining the technique. Each experiment takes six days. Science in Australia is handicapped in producing such a neat solution because successive governments never seem to see its value. Dr Spradbery is marking 21 years since the establishment of his consultancy, XCS, named for its scientists who left the CSIRO after involuntary redundancies.

"They [CSIRO] were hitting agriculture-based divisions like the plant industry and entomology. Anything involving agriculture wasn't considered very high," he said. As the top entomologist tapped people on the shoulder to tell them to go, he would suggest they call Dr Spradbery, who had already left of his own accord to establish XCS Consulting.

Eventually XCS registered 75 consultants, among them subsidiaries including SOILCAM which specialised in harvesting and distribution of introduced dung beetles under the enthusiastic direction of John Feehan, and FLYCAM headed by Bob Tozer and based in Queensland, specialising in controlling livestock pests.

"There is no longer a division of entomology," says Dr Spradbery. "At least there was a focal point in Australia, if you wanted to do entomology, there was a CSIRO division devoted to it, with all its different components... genetics, bio control, weed control, animals, insects affecting animals and humans, all those lovely subdivisions."

These days he says the biggest challenge for an entomologist is finding and keeping a job. "Can you imagine the young under graduates today wondering what they are going to do, they are all going to go overseas to get work at the rate we are going. That's tragic."