Hi guys,
I was just walking in my garden and saw a wasp and a bee,but could not recognise them correctly
I am getting confused between these two insects,can anyone help me out by telling a few differences about these two insects
Well I don’t know the difference as well . It seems I am also learning. Thanks for correcting me
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Most bees have branched body hairs, as opposed to the unbranched ones we see in many wasps. (I know, this is a tough one to see…) Most bees are relatively stocky, except for some of the smaller ones, whereas most wasps are rather slender. Bees and wasps both have 4 wings – if you see something like a bee or wasp that clearly has only 2 wings, it’s going to be a fly, perhaps one of the flower flies or bee flies.
It is true that honeybees can only sting once, since their stingers have barbs that prevent them from extracting them easily, but honeybees aren’t our only bees. In any case, it’s no fun being stung even once, so best to avoid making them feel like they have to sting you.
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Bees are wasps. They are a type of wasp.
Both bees and wasps have 4 wings.
Only honey bees dies after stinging. Most of the native bees can sting multiple times, but choose not to.
This presentation goes over Bees versus other wasps pretty well: https://u.osu.edu/beelab/identifying-common-bees-of-the-great-lakes-region-with-olivia-carril/
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yeah second point I made is wrong both have 4 wings and native bees can stung more than once
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There are so many different kinds of bees, and so many different wasps, and also there are so many bee and wasp mimics in other groups of flying insects, that it is easy to get confused as to what is what.
I would say, try to take good pics and upload them to iNat. Once they get IDed, you will, after some experience, start to learn what is what.
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Out of curiosity, how would one determine a bald/naked bee from a wasp?
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No, bees are bees, not wasps. They have been lately merged with apoid wasps into one superfamily (Apoidea) but that doesn’t make them wasps.
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It’s sometimes hard. There are some clues to tell a bee (like Nomada sp.) from a wasp of family Vespidae (shape of eye, position of wings when sitting) but it’s more hard with apoid wasps. As mentioned above, bees have branched hairs and wasps don’t but it’s hard to see in the field.
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Depends on whether someone wants to treat “wasps” as a scientifically-defined clade, or not. Since bees are a subgroup nested within the Apoidea, they are a type of wasp from a cladistic perspective, because a clade that includes all wasps necessarily also includes all bees (and all ants as well). If you ignore cladistics, then the word “wasp” has no meaningful definition; whether or not that matters just depends on how you treat names.
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Welcome to the Forum!!
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Bees have 4 wings too…? Also bees are not wasps…
Edit: just realized you mentioned the # of wings in a later post
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True enough, but perhaps that is a flaw in the usage of the word wasp. If we take “bees and apoid wasps” as one clade, and “ants and vespoid wasps” as another, it may just show that the apoids and vespoids are too different from each other for the term “wasps” to work.
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Offhand we don’t know where you live, and also (therefore) we don’t know which kind of bee you are likely to have seen, or what kind of wasp you are likely to have seen. Maybe you saw a Honeybee? And maybe the wasp was one of the species of Yellowjacket?
They are both roughly the same size, but they do look quite different from one another.
This is what the Western Honey Bee looks like:
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47219-Apis-mellifera
And this is what the Eastern Yellowjacket looks like:
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I live in the southern part of India,I saw a Apis cerana indica (type of honey bee common in India) and Yellow Potter Wasp
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The problem with saying that bees aren’t wasps is that treating wasps as a monolithic entity that can be separated from bees misrepresents the diversity of wasps and obscures the fact that many wasps are more closely related and more similar to bees than they are to other groups called wasps. It’s like if there was a word for “an American who isn’t from Florida”.
Case in point, bees and many types of wasps have stingers and build nests, but ichneumonoid and chalcidoid wasps do not. Does it really make sense to have a term that unites hornets, pollen wasps, digger wasps, fairy wasps, and ichneumon wasps but excludes bees? What do those groups have in common except for not being bees?
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I think that using the term wasps for these groups at all is a relic of an obsolete view of what a wasp is. We don’t refer to all non-bat mammals as rodents; it makes no more sense to refer to all non-bee hymenoptera as wasps.
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Not really, there’re smooth bees too.
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In Russian all Parasitica are called riders/horsemen, they don’t look like “true wasps” too.
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