Do you know a bee from a wasp?
Imitating bees and wasps can be worthwhile even for harmless flies.
Is It A Bee?
Many people confuse bees with their relations the wasps and with their imitators among other insects.
Wasps eat animal food mostly and never store any honey. They make their nests from paper and colonies only last a season. The basic colour for wasps is black and yellow stripes. Some wasps have some red as well. We have about eight kinds of wasps. Americans call them “yellow jackets” Bumble bees are the biggest bees we have in the UK, They are quite furry and our 20 or so different kinds have different patterns of stripes. The basic colour is black or brown with stripes of yellow or white. The stripes are wide, not like a wasp. A bumble bee nest is like a birds nest and only a few have more than 100 bees in them. Typical bumble bee nest places are in compost heaps, under garden sheds, in mouse holes and in tussocks of grass. Honey bees live in big colonies that persist from year to year, living on stored honey during the winter. A small colony will have 5,000 bees, a big one over 100,000. With so many they can afford to lose a few defending their home so they are much more willing to sting you if you interfere. Honey bees are smaller than most wasps and are usually dark brown, sometimes with paler bands of yellow or orange. They are never black and yellow. Worker honey bee on an
Hornets are particularly big wasps. They live in similar paper nests and eat other insects. In this picture you see the red tint typical of a hornet as compared with most smaller wasps. Though they look and sound fearsome, hornets are not really more dangerous than other wasps and perhaps even a bit less agressive.
Some of the smaller browner Bumble bees are known as Carder Bees because of their habit of shredding grass; "carding " it,like someone preparing wool for spinning
Solitary bees work on their own, though they may all choose the same part of your garden to live in. Each female makes a row of cells in a hole and provides the eggs she lays with enough pollen to eat and grow to adulthood. Most solitary bees cannot sting and it would be hard to get any solitary or bumble bee to sting you.
The solitary bee in this picture carries pollen, but in a mass all over her hind legs and the side of her thorax, unlike the "corbicula" pollen baskets of the honey bee.
Astrantia flowerhead
Honey bees at the entrance to a skep
A hover fly on hedge parsley flowers
Imitating bees and wasps is a good way to be left alone so that birds don’t eat you. So there are numerous kinds of flies that look and sound very much like their dangerous relatives. It’s a bluff and you can spot the difference easily with practice.
