Honeybee or Yellow Jacket?

It can be a dangerous game of mistaken identity. While honeybees and yellow jacket wasps look very similar, one has a painful stinger and the other may be the key to feeding the world for decades to come.

To be perfectly transparent, honeybees also have stingers, but they rarely use them - and only in self-defense. In fact, when a honeybee is forced to sting someone in order to defend their hive, it’s a suicide mission. The stinger, once embedded in a human arm or leg, stays there. In trying to fly away, a honeybee will rip their bodies apart. But enough about that.

While there are small similarities between honeybees and yellow jacket wasps, there are clear differences you can and should look for. Honeybees help us, but these wasps will only injure us.

What They Share

Both yellow jackets and honeybees are flying insects. Both have a yellow or yellowish brown color, offset with some black. They both sport a pair of wings, antennae, segmented bodies and, as we mentioned, stingers. They’re both about the same length, too, with queens a bit larger.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Their Color

While both have some yellow and some black, that’s an oversimplification. Yellow jackets are bright yellow with vivid black markings. Honeybees are more of a golden brown or even amber color of yellow. Honeybees black markings are wider, looking more like equal stripes than the dark sections of a wasp.

Honeybees are also fuzzy. They have thousands of tiny hairs all over their abdomen that work to pick up the pollen that the bees both move from plant to plant but also use to create honey. If you see one hard at work, look closely and you’ll spot the little bits of pollen clinging to their legs.

Their Shape

 Even if they weren’t already fuzzy, honeybees are more rounded, or chubbier for lack of a better term, than yellow jackets. Yellow jacket wasps are sleek, smooth, and shiny. They have an apparent waist in the middle of their abdomen. Yellow jackets also have thinner, slightly longer wings. Just like their bodies, honeybees’ wings are wider, more spread out, closer to those of a housefly than those of a wasp.

As we mentioned, they both have stingers. But yellow jackets can sting multiple times – one of the reasons they’re so dangerous. Honeybees are one and done. Once they sting you, part of their abdomen, digestive tract, muscles and nerves get pulled out of the honeybee's body - which is why they only use it in self-defense.

Their Behavior

Honeybees flit from flowering plant to flowering plant, acting as pollinators. They are the number one insect for that task, although there are a few others who help out, like moths, butterflies, and even mosquitoes. Bees and their dedication to pollination makes them a pivotal part of our food production process. Without honeybees it would be difficult to maintain the food supply we need to sustain the 8-billion people on our planet.

Yellow jackets are only in it for themselves. They buzz around and can be very aggressive, especially if they think they’ve found a food or water source. Unlike honeybees who harvest nectar and pollen using them to make their own food, wasps are scavengers, seeking meat and sweet substances. If you’re eating candy or leave your soda unattended and an insect comes directly at you, it’s a wasp, not a honeybee.

To be fair, yellow jackets do actually help with some pollination, but for them it’s more of a side effect as they seek out their sustenance. Their bodies aren’t designed for the process, so it’s accidental and not very efficient.

All of God’s creatures have value, so we would be remiss if we didn’t point out that wasps often give some aid to farmers. Along with scavenging, they also prey on several pesky insects, like caterpillars and flies that can damage crops. They also assist with recycling nutrients into the ecosystem faster than normal decomposition.

Their Nests

Honeybees are nature’s architects. Their hives are intricate works of engineering made of wax secreted from their own bodies and serve multiple purposes – raising their young, storing pollen and honey, even possibly communicating. Honeybee hives are usually in hollow trees, or more likely these days, in man-made bee boxes. These habitats allow us to harvest their honey and honeycomb without harming the bees.

Wasps? Well, again, it’s quite different. Like pirates or insect vultures, they like to take over attic spaces, doorways, sheds, holes in walls, rotting logs, or crumbling wood. They make their nests from chewed up cellulose - paper, cardboard, even sometimes cloth. When it’s packed in, it looks papery. On the Gulf Coast of Florida, they will sometimes enclose several smaller nests, each one with one or two wasps waiting to hatch.

You may recall the murder bees that were in the news a few years ago? Those were hornets, close cousins to the wasps - and both can pose a threat to hard working honeybees.

What’s the Buzz?

To summarize -  honeybees good, yellow jackets bad! While they both have some similarities, the differences are what makes one dangerous and the other delicious - their honey, at least; don’t eat the bees.

If you have bees around your home and yard, that’s a good thing. In fact, if you see one on the sidewalk or trying and failing to fly up to a flower, you can carefully help it out, moving it to a flower or dripping a little sugar water next to them. Unless you’re allergic of course - please don’t tempt fate that way.

If you see wasps flying around or nests in the crevices of your home, call an expert to remove them. Too many people get stung, often multiple times, trying to wave wasps away or partially destroying a nest. Just let a trained professional handle it.

One of the things our experienced technicians at Good News Pest Solutions look for in our initial inspection is signs of wasp infestation. We take care of yellow jackets as part of our Go Green Perimeter Plus program and recommend sealing up potential entry points for future wasps.  For more details on our programs or to schedule your first appointment, please give us a call!