Identify Wasps

The wasp family of insects includes thousands of species all around the world, most of which are predatory. The most common types of wasps are hornets, yellow jackets, and paper wasps. Knowing how to identify wasps can be difficult as it's not easy to study the physical appearance of a wasp from a distance. Moreover, for the average person, bees and wasps tend to look alike and can be easily confused for one another. Nevertheless, there are a good number of tips and tricks that you can use to see if an insect is a wasp or not, and react accordingly.

Steps

Colors

  1. Look for the characteristic black and yellow or a brownish red color pattern. Obviously, some species of bees have a similar color pattern too, so this isn't decisive. And while color can be a great immediate indicator, careful closer inspection will be necessary to make a more accurate judgment. Wasps can be identified by its yellow and black stripes.
  2. Look for a predominantly black appearance with small white markings. If the insect you're observing looks like this, it may be a hornet, which is a type of wasp.
  3. Look for brown, red, or yellow colors. A wasp with these colors is most likely a paper wasp.

Body features

  1. Watch the wasp fly and look for two long rear legs that hang and dangle straight down mid-flight. When a bee is flying, its legs will likely disappear or be very difficult to spot.
  2. After the insect has landed on a wall, desk, or some other object, look closely at its wings to see if the wings pull in and rest against its body. If the insect is a bee, its wings will stick out to the sides.
  3. Look for a waist that is thinner than the rest of the body. Different wasps will have differing degrees of waist thinness, but none will have waists that are indistinguishable from their bodies. Paper wasps have extremely thin waists in comparison to other wasps, for example. By contrast, a bee's waist will be just as wide as its body.
  4. Look for hair, or lack of it, on the insect. Most species of bees, especially the honey bee, will have lots of short, fuzzy hairs along the area behind their heads. This helps them to gather pollen. Except in special cases, like the European hornet and the Great Golden Digger Wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus), wasps will rarely––if ever––have hair at all because they don't need it. They tend to be sleek and shiny.

Size

  1. Measure the wasp. Yellow jackets average approximately 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) in length, while hornets average approximately 0.7 inches (1.8 cm) in length.

Tips

  • Bees tend to be more mild-mannered than wasps. Wasps tend to hang around your picnic aggressively seeking your food while the bees are buzzing around the blossoms instead.
  • If stung, a honeybee leaves her stinger in you because it is barbed and is torn from her body when she leaves (often killing her in the process). A wasp's stinger is smooth, which means that while the stinger won't be stuck in your skin, you can be stung multiple times in one attack.
  • If you come across a nest and want to know if it's a bee nest or a wasp nest, here are some tips:
    • Bee nests are made of wax cells. They often use cavities in trees, holes in the ground or other objects to build a nest inside.
    • Wasp nests are made from papery cones of chewed up fibers mixed with saliva. Wasps tend to find hiding places for their nests, such as crevices or under the eaves of a house.

Warnings

  • Honeybees and yellow jacket wasps can send chemical alarms back to their nests and many other insects can start coming after you to attack. If stung, stay calm, consider leaving immediately and do not try to harm the stinging insect or it may release its chemical alarm.

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