People often don’t understand the difference between two these pretty beautiful black and yellow color insects. I’ll try to explain the main deference between them. For example, I’ll tell you about their sizes, stings, behavior, vital activity, usefulness and so on.
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The sizes

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Yes, two these interesting insects have a pretty similar black and yellow color. However, the bees are much smaller than the wasps. Have you ever seen two these insects together? Wasps are really huge comparing with bees. Moreover, they make a little bit different sound. The buzzed «language» of these insects is a huge another topic. I’ll just tell you that wasps are louder than bees.
Adding to that, the shape of the bee’s and swap’s body is different too. Yes, they have similar black and yellow color but this color, actually, is different. Bee has a more rounded body shape. Its cover has villi; the color is muted. The swap has a smooth elongated body and very bright colors.

Vital activity and usefulness

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Bees are toilers because of their nature. They are ready to work endless for the good of their hive. The food of bees is a flowers’ nectar. They can’t eat something else, the flowers’ nectar is their just one their food. Bees plays a very important economical and agricultural role. Collecting nectar of flowers, bees produce a variety of useful and healthy products that people use in pharmaceuticals and human nutrition. The bees even use industrially in the open fields. Bees’ honeycombs are erected by their own wax by people.

The wasps aren’t able to produce any useful products. They make their hives from the different wastes. All these waste can be really different but in the most of cases aren’t useful at all. The nutrition of wasps is diversely enough. They can eat both fruits and nectar. That’s because we always can meet swaps near the fruit stalls at the trades. Moreover, swaps can even eat flies and other small insects. They can even eat the meat products in the towns and cities.
However, wasps are not that useless. They are not useful for people but they’re very useful for nature. For example, they play a very important ecological role: adult wasps visit the places of juice on the trunks of trees (in particular, elm and aspen) and inflorescences of various plants.
By the way, wasps are smart enough: wasps actively catch various small insects, including bees, but mostly small caterpillars, the flies-eristaly and various two-wing insects to feed the young workers.

Behavior

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The bees sting just if they see a real dangerous, just in an emergence situation. Moreover, they do it just if someone attack them first and they must protect thir hive. The bee dies immediately after the sting and lost her sting in the body of its rival.
There’s a certain hierarchy in the family of bees. The highest position always takes bee calls «queen». All bees care about her well-being because just queen is able to multiply the hive. The bees create all conditions for her comfortable existence at winter.
The wasp is an aggressive insect enough. Molestation and ability to sting at any time are the main characteristics of wasp. Adding to that, wasps don’t die after their sting. Moreover, the wasp use the jaw apparatus for protecting of rivals, what isn’t characteristically for insects of this family. The queen spends the winter alone; it doesn’t have helpers or securities. It leaves larvae and build a nest in the whole loneliness.

The sting

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Many sources indicate that bees unlike swaps have serrated sting. That’s not exactly like that. Wasps have developed a more perfect weapon in the process of evolution – the sting of the predator that is also provided with notches, but the notch smaller than the bee’s one.
The most important thing is that there’s not a kind of assembly on the bee’s tip of sting. That’s because wasps can sting for many times and bees die after the first sting.

In conclusion, I want to say that the main difference is that bees make a great very healthy honey and many other different useful products and die from the first sting. Nowadays people haven’t found any useful products from swaps, moreover, they can sting as many times as they want.

Thank you for your attention!

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My previous articles:

• What’s Going on When The Bees Stings You?
• How to Unite Bee Families.