By Chris Simms

Ian Grainger + JJ Gouin/Alamy

IT IS a beautiful, sunny day. The smell of a barbecue is in the air and a bee is bumbling from flower to flower. Everything feels perfect. Then a wasp appears, stirring up rather different feelings: fear, loathing, anger.

Our widespread dislike of wasps – and love of bees – goes back a long way. “Hornets and wasps… are devoid of the extraordinary features which characterise bees,” wrote Aristotle more than 2000 years ago. Was he right, or is there more to wasps than most people think?

It is hard to fairly compare different animals, but we enjoy a challenge, so here we pit the talents of bees against those of wasps in eight categories, from cognitive skills to stings, architecture to navigation.

Most social insects communicate with a vocabulary of chemicals and vibrations,” says Fred Dyer at Michigan State University. This includes bees and wasps.

Honeybees use their abdomens to drum up vibrations to create a “get to work” signal. Wasps also engage in gastral drumming, banging their abdomens against the walls of the nest when there is food nearby.

Bees and wasps emit hisses, buzzes and chirps, and wasp larvae make a popping sound to alert adults that they need food. On the chemical front, individual social bees and wasps release substances to communicate and provoke responses, such as recruiting others to join them in getting food or inciting them to defend their home. Queen honeybees produce a chemical mix called the “queen signal” that physiologically alters the development of other bees. Bees are not meat eaters and do not consume prey insects or spiders. Rather, they consume plant pollens and nectar from flowering plants. For most of the year, wasps are predators and feed other arthropods and insects to their young, but in late summer and fall, when queens stop laying eggs and their nest declines, they are more interested in collecting sweets and other carbohydrates. It is not unusual to experience aggressive yellow jackets who become scavengers around food and sweet drinks.

Nests

Bees make their nests from wax; wasp nests are made from paper-like materials of chewed wood particles and their own saliva. Honey bees (Apis mellifera) are perennial insects and as long as the colony is healthy, the nest remains active for many years. Wasps and bumblebees only use their nests for one year because they have annual life cycles. Only a few specialized wasps reuse old nests.

Bee and Wasp Stings

Wasps and bees sting to defend themselves and their colony. Honey bees’ stingers are barbed, so after stinging and flying away, the stinger is torn from the bee’s abdomen and remains in the skin. Wasps and bumblebees can pull out their stinger, so they’re able to sting more than once without injuring themselves. More often than not, but not always, a wasp or bumblebee doesn’t leave its stinger in the skin.

Commonly Seen Bees and Wasps

The most commonly encountered bees are honey bees and bumblebees. Another type of bee that may be seen in open areas of yards during the spring are solitary, ground nesting bees. They do not form colonies, but are important pollinators of many plants. Commonly seen wasps are yellow jackets, hornets, cicada killers and numerous species of paper wasps.