That Was No Bee!

I had lunch with two friends last week, and it quickly devolved into one of those conversations that make me want to bang my head on the nearest wall. We were at a table by the window at Paul’s, and Mary said, with alarm, “Eww, there’s a bee! Ellen, kill it!”“It’s not a bee, it’s a yellow jacket,” I interjected hopefully, as part of my ongoing campaign to educate the masses, or at least close friends.

“You kill it, I don’t want it to bite me,” Ellen told Mary, ignoring me as usual.

“It’s not going to bite you. It doesn’t have teeth.” I don’t give up that easily. “And it really doesn’t even want to sting you. It wants to be outside, which is why it’s hovering in the window. But if you keep swatting at it with that paper, it may very well sting you.”

Ellen: “I hate bees. I know you have a bee thing, but I hate bees.”

Me: “Well, OK, but it’s still not a bee. It’s a yellow jacket. A wasp.”

Ellen: “Same thing.”

Deep, depressed sigh. “No, a yellow jacket is a WASP, not a bee. Huge difference. They’re both animals, but that’s about it.”

Ellen: “Animals? Aren’t they insects?”

Me: “Are they vegetables? If they’re not vegetables, they’re animals.”

And so it goes. My own friends are uninterested in the difference between bees and wasps, insistent on lumping them all into the category of “things that must be killed, the sooner the better.”

So why should I care if you can’t tell the difference between a honeybee and a yellow jacket? Because the notion that they’re one and the same gets a lot of innocent honeybees killed.

You find a colony of bees happily at home in a hollowed out tree, or see a swarm in your yard, and you panic and call an exterminator. If you believe you’ve been stung by a bee, you may learn to hate and fear bees. When your neighbor gets a beehive, you may freak out and threaten to sue, or even poison the hive. Well, YOU wouldn’t do that, or you probably wouldn’t be reading this column, but you get my drift.

Yellow jackets are dreadful, nasty creatures. They will often sting for no other reason than the simple fact that your existence annoys them, and they can sting repeatedly. They can also bite, I was surprised to learn. One charming habit of yellow jackets is their tendency to nest in holes in the ground. Run your lawnmower over a nest of 1,500 yellow jackets and I guarantee a memorable experience. These are not nice animals and you have good reasons not to want them in your yard.

Honeybees are like anti-yellow jackets. Yes, they can sting. But when a honeybee stings, it’s signing its own death warrant. The stinger, along with the bee’s hind end, stays embedded in the stingee, and the bee ceases to be. So it’s not in anybody’s best interest for bees to go around stinging people. Honeybees sting when they feel the hive is threatened. Unless you’re pestering a hive, you’re probably not going to be stung.*

As a beekeeper, I do get stung occasionally. Of course, when I get stung, I’ve probably just pried the roof off my girls’ home, moved some walls around and possibly even raided their pantry. I don’t know about you, but that would certainly make me cranky. And yet, most of the time, even that isn’t enough to make them sting. I’m congenitally clumsy, so most of my stings are self-inflicted when I accidentally squash one of the girls.

As summer morphs into fall, yellow jackets seem to be everywhere. You’re eating an ice cream cone and voila! A yellow jacket wants to share your snack. You’re picking late-season raspberries and the yellow jackets race you to the ripest berries. Wherever there’s sugar, there are yellow jackets.

Earlier in the season, you may not notice them as much. They are primarily meat eaters, sometimes even called meat bees. They feed on other insects, including my honeybees when they can get them. Yellow jackets bring large quantities of protein back to their hives to feed the queen and larvae. In exchange, the larvae secrete a sugary substance that the wasps eat. But late in the season, the supply of insects decreases, wasp larvae secrete less of the sweet stuff, and the adult yellow jackets become almost frantic in their hunt for sugar. Cross paths with a cranky yellow jacket and you are probably going to get stung.

While clearly inferior to honeybees, yellow jackets are not without value. They clear pests like aphids and caterpillars from crops, and they do pollinate some plants, notably goldenrod. They’re not the good neighbors honeybees are, but if you respect their space they will generally respect yours. And if you DO get stung, please don’t malign my honeybees—they have enough to deal with!

*Caveat: If you happen to be in the vicinity when a truck carrying hundreds of hives overturns and the bees are toppled out onto the road, all bets are off. It might not surprise you to learn that honeybees consider that a threatening scenario and get duly agitated.