In popular culture, wasps get a bad rap as aggressive, sting-happy and not nearly as ecologically important as their bee cousins. A 9-foot statue of a wasp recently installed outside the state's new North Valley Complex building in Wilsonville hopes to change that.

Meet Megarhyssa, one of the largest non-stinging wasp genuses native to Oregon. In silicon bronze atop a 23-foot steel microscope, an artist's interpretation of the wasp can be found outside the new home of the Oregon Department of Agriculture's entomology department.

State entomologist Josh Vlach hopes the statue draws attention to his department's vital work identifying and studying insects - and the important roles wasps play in forest health.

The 212,000-square-foot North Valley Complex opened in January to house multiple stage agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Administrative Services, Oregon's Occupational Safety and Health Division and Oregon State Police.

The building is home to several state labs studying things like animal-related pathogens, agricultural diseases, shellfish bacteria, crop pesticides and pathogens in food production facilities.

The entomologists focus on invasive insect species impacting forestry and agriculture. Here you'll find the state's insect museum, containing more than 60,000 specimens of 6,000 species, which scientists use to identify insects and determine which ones should be in Oregon.

Construction of the North Valley Complex project cost $82 million, and 1% of that budget went to public art.

"We had talked about having something iconic out by the road," said Vlach, who was part of the art selection committee, "which I think has been accomplished."

That roadside piece is "MegaScope" by artist Pete Beeman. It features a Megarhyssa "stump stabber" parasitic wasp, with moveable wings, riding atop a towering microscope.

In real life, most female Megarhyssas have a 2-inch-long body and a terrifying-looking 4-inch "tail" that could be mistaken for a stinger. That's the wasp's ovipositor, used to drill into wood where the wasp lays her eggs inside the larvae of wood borer insects. The wasp eggs hatch first, eating the wood borer larvae from the inside.

That's what Vlach finds amazing about the Megarhyssa.

"They can hear wood borers inside, they can hear their chewing, and they can actually guide this little ovipositor through the wood into the larvae of the wood borer and inject an egg in it," Vlach said.

The Megarhyssa's relationship with wood borers makes it a particular hero to Oregon's entomologists, who specialize in studying the tree-damaging beetles. State and federal agencies across the country send wood borer samples to Wilsonville for identification, Vlach said.

While Oregon is home to native wood borers, invasive wood borer species are a huge threat to native trees. Most worrisome is the emerald ash borer, a northeast Asian beetle that is deadly to all ash tree species in North America.

"It'll effectively make ash trees extinct here," Vlach said. "There's been quite a bit of effort to both save seeds and to mitigate the spread of that pest."

Oregon's emerald ash borer invasion was first discovered in Forest Grove in 2022. Entomologists have tried several strategies to slow the beetle's spread, including "biocontrol." That involves introducing predators of the invasive species.

In the case of the emerald ash borer, those predators are wasps.

Several species of tiny, stingless parasitic wasps (admittedly, not the Megarhyssa) are released to help control emerald ash borer infestations.

Scientists are also studying the habits and weaknesses of the Mediterranean oak borer, another invasive species that kills Oregon white oak trees. It was believed to be introduced via wine barrels shipped from Europe.

"The rate of invasion has had a huge increase since the 1980s when containerized shipping started," Vlach said. "It's an unseen cost. We're getting things for cheap, but then we also get this thing that kills our trees forever."

In addition to the MegaScope, the North Valley Complex is home to four other outdoor sculptures.

Standing at the building's front entrance, a stone sculpture by Washington artist Sue Taves features leaves and water with a carousel of small insects etched into its base.

Artists Crystal Schenk and Shelby Davis of CR&SH Studio in Milwaukie constructed three pieces of fused glass and steel, each paying homage to beehives, plant structures and molecular architecture.

"We hoped that the art would connect that there were many things going on here with labs and science and public service," Vlach said.