It’s easy to confuse bees and wasps from a distance. Bad for those who are afraid of the winged creatures – because you don’t really have to be afraid of bees. We explain how you can tell bees and wasps apart.
Lots of people have it – a terrified fear of wasps and bees. However, the latter are actually not aggressive at all, which is why they are often feared unjustly. However, it is often difficult to tell the winged animals apart.
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Bee or wasp: how to tell them apart
Actually, bees and wasps are not that difficult to distinguish. There are significant differences on the outside alone: wasps are characterized above all by their black and yellow stripes and the narrow waist , from which the term wasp waist originates. In addition, they are hardly hairy. Their physique allows wasps to fly faster than bees. In contrast to the wasp, the bee is stronger, hairier and rather brownish .
But bees and wasps differ not only in their appearance – their eating habits are also different. While the honey bee feeds exclusively on plant juices and nectar, the wasp also eats meat. This is also the reason why the animals literally flock to human food. Because they are pollen suckers, bees have a proboscis, while wasps have mouthparts with which they can hold and crush insects.
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The sting of the bee and wasp
However, the biggest difference between bees and wasps is their sting. While wasps use their stingers to hunt insects and can sting them repeatedly, bees use their stingers purely for defense – they can only sting once and then die. There is a barb in the bee sting that gets stuck in the human skin after the sting. If a bee has been stung and wants to fly away, the entire stinger tears off and it dies from its injuries. Because bees deliver all of their venom into the skin in one sting, bee stings tend to be more painful than wasp stings, which sting more often and therefore split the venom.
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