I have the same experience. I act very carefully around them not to threaten them. I also put a tiny bit of my food on the side for them when they get interested - I love watching them eat. They're like little insect tigers - striped, fierce, but tiny!
And I've had a wasp sting me just because I deserve to get fucked, I suppose. It just flew up, landed on my hand, sting me, then fucked off back to whichever circle of hell whence it emerged. There were dozens of other people around, but the allergic teenager was the only one who needed to have their weekend ruined.
I was camping with some friends ( all around 13 years old ) and one of my friends, the only allergic one in the group, sat on a wasp nest that was attached to a piece of trunk. The poor guy was stung all over. Luckily we were nearby a hospital and we were able laugh it off a few days later.
That was the one that made me realize I'd outgrown the series. Dunno if old RL was really phoning that one in or what, but one of his chapter cliffhangers ended with "and the dragonfly bit me in half!" Then the next chapter started with "But it was just my imagination."
Common wasp and germanicus vespula (european wasp) are both considered pest. Both dont pollinate. And both kill and destroy other friendly species when they do not harass you to steal your food. Same for asiatic and common hornet.
All other wasp and hornet like the blue hornet are friendly and help the ecosystem. But you will rarely encounter them cause they let you the fuck alone and mind their own business...
They ARE in fact both pollinators! I get the wasp hate, but they are rather misunderstood, that's what the meme is about! Depending on the region you live in, learn which wasp and bee species are invasive in your area and support the native ones (including the common wasp and germanicus vespula).
I try to give paper wasps a pass if I randomly see them, but if they come inside or start a nest in outdoor equipment, they're gone. They only get consideration because they're pollinators and generally not aggressive, but they still will attack so my patience is thin.
Sure, but wasps made a nest right by our front door, and have the audacity to sting me when I simply walked outside. Maybe not assholes on purpose, but they deserved what they got.
Bees will warn you if you get too close, and if they run into you will fly off on their own or otherwise avoid you.
I used to work near a mall with a fountain where one edge of it would always have water splashing up. Place near there had honeybees. In the dry summers there would always be bees chilling out and enjoying the cold fountain water on the ledge, usually next to human workers also on lunch.
Wasps intentionally get in your face and will sting you because you had the gall to exist in their flight path.
The wasps local to me will literally chase people, it's nuts. You can practically hear them saying "Come at be bro! Wait come back here I wasn't finished with you". I can't even have picnics certain times of the year because of them, because instead of just making a run for the food like other bugs they like to chase you away first. I once had to finish my little caesars in the car because a wasp was trying to get between me and my pie in the park. I was literally watching the fucker throw it's body into my windshield repeatedly as I continued eating in safety, and it didn't stop until I drove away. Psychotic man. I don't mess with wasps. Our bees are awesome though.
bees are like stoner dudes, they might bump into you and ask if they can have that sandwich you're holding, but you can just politely decline and they'll go "alright, cool" and keep going along.
hornets are like unruly children with a sewing needle, they have no remorse and will stab you in the shins in hopes that you drop the sandwich.
Nope. Don't care. I'm a scientific realist. 99.999% of the time I educate myself on matters such as these if I am misinformed, and change my stance promptly based on new information.
If wasps realize that I am a giant who can easily kill them, why are they so incessant on invading my personal space?
I's like going to a kickboxing tournament as an untrained person and flipping off every kickboxer within kickboxing range, then slapping them when they tell you to fuck off.
"Ah, behold! A gargantuan dwelling of the giants! We'll just put our giant clumpy mud hive right up here until we reproduce infinitely unchecked, and then perceive them as a threat for daring to venture outside! Peace an' love y'all."
"Ah hah! Look at this patch of grass! The giants stomp around here regularly. We shall burrow and hide beneath it, reacting with furious hellfire should we be tread on!"
"Avast, ye, mammal! You are within like a kilometer of my turf! Your life is hereby forfeit!"
--Various kinds of wasps, probably.
I'm all for letting things be(e), but I get pretty pissed when creatures have the audacity to attach to or otherwise colonize your dwelling and then get mad and violent that it's your dwelling.
jumping spiders are the invertebrates who know you're effectively a god compared to them, they'll just stand still and try not to be noticed, and if you start very obviously studying it they tend to realize there's not much more they can do and they just study you back.
There are different kinds of wasps. Where I live, out of the many many kinds, only two are annoying in that they are aggressive and try to get your food. All others are chill and will leave you alone if you leave them alone. We had a nest outside our house one year. Often times, our paths would cross. A wasp would collide with us, just sit there in the air for a second, then fly around us. No time to chat, gotta get food for the hive.
Also: bees and bumblebees will just take the day off if the weather is shitty. Wasps? MUST GET MORE FOOD. Hailstorm? Tornado? Lightning strikes five yards away? No excuse.
Do you know why that would be a positive evolutionary trait? Clearly, if they try to retract it, at some point in the history they must have been able to do so.
Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don't get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).
It makes it more dangerous : the sting is attach to the venom bag, so the venom bag gets to empty itself whole if it stays. Evolution would have chosen the survival of the hive, not the survival of the bee.
One thing is weird though : you can extract the sting of a wasp with a pincer. The wasp will live through it. Why do the bee dies when it loses it's sting and not the wasp?
That doesn't even make any sense if you stop and think about it at all. Sure, a single worker bee dying isn't a huge deal, but they all do that. It would definitely be better for the hive and the queen if they didn't rip their own guts out.
but worker bees generally don't have to sting anything, the amount of them that do have to do so is low enough that it's not a big issue, and they have probably gotten work done before dying anyways.
I have learned thru my years of gardening that wasps and hornets are a good thing to have around, not just bees. Not only do they help pollinate flowers, they are predators to some of the most annoying garden pests. I think I've counted at least 7 different wasp species in my garden this summer, they've done a great job keeping the larger pest populations manageable.
Well maybe it would be easier to "Give them some Space" if their pupae didn't completely cut off all their food processing in the fall leading to rampant aggression as they seek out sugary and fermented smells such as beer, fruits, and candy.
I think wasps and hornets are beautiful, fascinating creatures. Most of them don't mess with me even a few inches from a nest. There are one or two species that are looking for war and get the spray.
You basically got it. European honey bees consume the already dwindling nectar and pollen resources for North American native pollinators. Furthermore, European honey bees are also worse at actually pollinating North American flowers because they did not co-evolve with the species we have here.
They're problematic even in their native range because people keep too many of them and they compete with other important pollinators, often other bee species. Honey bees don't pollinate all species they take pollen and nectar from and those species are then not visited by their specialised pollinators, leading to decrease in numbers of both plants and pollinators.
They are not conflicting but I can see how you might think that. Pollen is plant sperm. In order for pollination to occur many plants have special needs. The pollen has to be "picked up" and transferred to the female stigma. One example of how honeybees take nectar but don't pollinate flowers are flowers that require "buzz pollinating".
Hope that clears things up. Happy to answer anymore questions (I am just someone who is passionate about nature I'm not a professional or anything).
They often don't. Honey bees are surprisingly good at collecting pollen of many plant species without transfering it to other flowers and pollinating them.
I hope somebody can help me with this: could a bee theoretically evolve to have a stronger stinger so that stinging a human's skin multiple times would be possible?
If bees would evolve like other animals those who survive stinging humans would produce more offspring, but in this case only the queen produces offspring and the queen probably contact with human skin so this trait wouldn't be favoured by evolution. Or am I looking at this wrong?
Yes, they are! They're into sweet nectar - that's why they also tend to visit our sweet drinks. The adults also sometimes search for bits of meat for the carnivorous larvae. In this mode they act like insect pest control.
There are a lot of different species which serve as pollinators besides bees. Afaik, some are more specialised into specific flowers/plants than others and without them, these plants wouldn't be able to reproduce. (Yucca moths for example.)
If the female wasp crawls into the caprifig, she can successfully lay her eggs and die. The males hatch first, mate with the females, dig tunnels out of the caprifig, and die. The females, now covered in fig pollen from the caprifig, fly out to begin the cycle again. If the female wasp crawls into a female fig, she will not be able to successfully lay her eggs despite pollinating the fig with pollen from the caprifig she hatched in. The fig will absorb her body and her eggs as the fruit develops.
Wasp nest in wall, specialist comes out, sucks them all out, sprays commercial insecticide into wall cavity. Wasps that were out of nest at the time come back and get confused and piss off, couple days later they're back and have found new unbefore seen holes to fly into, specialist tells me to buy trap and fill with meat. Buy canned ham and dump in trap. All wasps that came back are now in trap. Thanks Ham.
Once I was spraying a hive of hornets. One of them collapses outside of the next and another flew grabbed him and pulled him back into the nest.
Fucking broke my heart.
In my limited experience I can confirm that at least some kinds of wasps are more than chill even directly near their nests.
Some are not even heavily interested in human food and in multiple occations they landed on my hands, cleaned their legs and flew away again.
In the last few years we had at least three nests within the roof of the house without an issue.
wasp propaganda
The bottom picture doesn’t make the top picture any less true.
*Beeality
Also, wasps will just sting you because "fuck you." Fuck that. Burn in heck.
Wasps stung a man in Reno just to watch him cry.
I don't think I was ever stung by a wasp, and I even held one in my hand once.
I've had a wasp fly up to me, land on me, sting me, and fly off, for no fucking reason! It has happened more than once. They're assholes.
Are you the wasp whisperer? The wasperer?
I send them after my enemies.
I have the same experience. I act very carefully around them not to threaten them. I also put a tiny bit of my food on the side for them when they get interested - I love watching them eat. They're like little insect tigers - striped, fierce, but tiny!
i've met some friendly wasps, heck i've met more friendly wasps then the evil ones
Shut up, wasp
bzz you!
*stings your ass*
AWAB
WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY!?!? >:3
*turns off bodycam*
*stings you vigorously*
And I've had a wasp sting me just because I deserve to get fucked, I suppose. It just flew up, landed on my hand, sting me, then fucked off back to whichever circle of hell whence it emerged. There were dozens of other people around, but the allergic teenager was the only one who needed to have their weekend ruined.
I was camping with some friends ( all around 13 years old ) and one of my friends, the only allergic one in the group, sat on a wasp nest that was attached to a piece of trunk. The poor guy was stung all over. Luckily we were nearby a hospital and we were able laugh it off a few days later.
https://youtu.be/i5ZcCHCxhc4
The wasp stings me to protect its family, I kill the wasp to protect mine. Glad it's me who's the giant.
That was the one that made me realize I'd outgrown the series. Dunno if old RL was really phoning that one in or what, but one of his chapter cliffhangers ended with "and the dragonfly bit me in half!" Then the next chapter started with "But it was just my imagination."
Truly. Everyone knows that once a dragonfly sets its sights on you, your chances of survival are nil. Gary stood no chance.
Okay, but bumblebees are the best though. Even fluffier than honey bees, and they almost never sting humans.
Sadly they're also one of the types of bee that's losing out in their native habitats to human supported honey bees.
Carpenter bees
Carpenter bees are also cool. Not as fluffy as bumblebees though.
Shiny hiney
Common wasp and germanicus vespula (european wasp) are both considered pest. Both dont pollinate. And both kill and destroy other friendly species when they do not harass you to steal your food. Same for asiatic and common hornet.
All other wasp and hornet like the blue hornet are friendly and help the ecosystem. But you will rarely encounter them cause they let you the fuck alone and mind their own business...
They ARE in fact both pollinators! I get the wasp hate, but they are rather misunderstood, that's what the meme is about! Depending on the region you live in, learn which wasp and bee species are invasive in your area and support the native ones (including the common wasp and germanicus vespula).
I try to give paper wasps a pass if I randomly see them, but if they come inside or start a nest in outdoor equipment, they're gone. They only get consideration because they're pollinators and generally not aggressive, but they still will attack so my patience is thin.
Ok fair but of the choices to have buzzing near me, I'm still picking the bee every time.
Sure, but wasps made a nest right by our front door, and have the audacity to sting me when I simply walked outside. Maybe not assholes on purpose, but they deserved what they got.
are you under the impression wasps understand the concept of front doors?
I'm under the impression that wasps know what being an asshole means because they're very good at it.
The Ellen Ripley special?
Bees will warn you if you get too close, and if they run into you will fly off on their own or otherwise avoid you.
I used to work near a mall with a fountain where one edge of it would always have water splashing up. Place near there had honeybees. In the dry summers there would always be bees chilling out and enjoying the cold fountain water on the ledge, usually next to human workers also on lunch.
Wasps intentionally get in your face and will sting you because you had the gall to exist in their flight path.
The wasps local to me will literally chase people, it's nuts. You can practically hear them saying "Come at be bro! Wait come back here I wasn't finished with you". I can't even have picnics certain times of the year because of them, because instead of just making a run for the food like other bugs they like to chase you away first. I once had to finish my little caesars in the car because a wasp was trying to get between me and my pie in the park. I was literally watching the fucker throw it's body into my windshield repeatedly as I continued eating in safety, and it didn't stop until I drove away. Psychotic man. I don't mess with wasps. Our bees are awesome though.
bees are like stoner dudes, they might bump into you and ask if they can have that sandwich you're holding, but you can just politely decline and they'll go "alright, cool" and keep going along.
hornets are like unruly children with a sewing needle, they have no remorse and will stab you in the shins in hopes that you drop the sandwich.
Nope. Don't care. I'm a scientific realist. 99.999% of the time I educate myself on matters such as these if I am misinformed, and change my stance promptly based on new information.
But not in this case.
Fuck this meme, fuck this info, and fuck wasps.
in what sense are you a realist
They really exist
the reality that hornets are miserable dickwads who exist to torture humans specifically.
🙄 troll on
At least educate youtself on the bee part, it's really interesting!
Yeah, they are, just really hate wasps and this was sort of a joke comment. Except for the hating wasps part. did I mention that?
Waspaganda!
If wasps realize that I am a giant who can easily kill them, why are they so incessant on invading my personal space?
I's like going to a kickboxing tournament as an untrained person and flipping off every kickboxer within kickboxing range, then slapping them when they tell you to fuck off.
This.
"Ah, behold! A gargantuan dwelling of the giants! We'll just put our giant clumpy mud hive right up here until we reproduce infinitely unchecked, and then perceive them as a threat for daring to venture outside! Peace an' love y'all."
"Ah hah! Look at this patch of grass! The giants stomp around here regularly. We shall burrow and hide beneath it, reacting with furious hellfire should we be tread on!"
"Avast, ye, mammal! You are within like a kilometer of my turf! Your life is hereby forfeit!"
--Various kinds of wasps, probably.
I'm all for letting things be(e), but I get pretty pissed when creatures have the audacity to attach to or otherwise colonize your dwelling and then get mad and violent that it's your dwelling.
jumping spiders are the invertebrates who know you're effectively a god compared to them, they'll just stand still and try not to be noticed, and if you start very obviously studying it they tend to realize there's not much more they can do and they just study you back.
And I relish in proving them right. Fuck wasps and fuck your wasp propaganda.
I've given bees snacks when they're tuckered out on a hot day. I've let them rest on me. But with wasps and hornets it's on sight.
I had a yellow jacket fly out of the blue then land on my heel and sting me for absolutely no reason! There wasn't even a nest nearby!
Then a week later another yellow jacket landed on my arm and stung me right under my watch band
Pretty rude if you ask me
You know what you did.
There we go, that'll learn 'em for having singers. Now to enjoy some peace.
Did we just nuke Hollywood?
There are different kinds of wasps. Where I live, out of the many many kinds, only two are annoying in that they are aggressive and try to get your food. All others are chill and will leave you alone if you leave them alone. We had a nest outside our house one year. Often times, our paths would cross. A wasp would collide with us, just sit there in the air for a second, then fly around us. No time to chat, gotta get food for the hive. Also: bees and bumblebees will just take the day off if the weather is shitty. Wasps? MUST GET MORE FOOD. Hailstorm? Tornado? Lightning strikes five yards away? No excuse.
They have barbed stingers. Their stinger rips the bottom part of their abdomen off when they try to retract it. They don't live through that.
Do you know why that would be a positive evolutionary trait? Clearly, if they try to retract it, at some point in the history they must have been able to do so.
Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don't get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).
It makes it more dangerous : the sting is attach to the venom bag, so the venom bag gets to empty itself whole if it stays. Evolution would have chosen the survival of the hive, not the survival of the bee.
One thing is weird though : you can extract the sting of a wasp with a pincer. The wasp will live through it. Why do the bee dies when it loses it's sting and not the wasp?
Bee genetics are wild and helped develop a system where it doesn't matter that the workers have tendencies to off themselves.
The worker bees do not reproduce, so their survival after stinging is not that important.
That doesn't even make any sense if you stop and think about it at all. Sure, a single worker bee dying isn't a huge deal, but they all do that. It would definitely be better for the hive and the queen if they didn't rip their own guts out.
but worker bees generally don't have to sting anything, the amount of them that do have to do so is low enough that it's not a big issue, and they have probably gotten work done before dying anyways.
I've been stung about half a dozen times by wasps so far this year. They're beginning to piss me off.
And as an adult, my sister stepped on a hornets nest and damn near ended up dead. 150 stings had her in ICU for 4 days.
I have learned thru my years of gardening that wasps and hornets are a good thing to have around, not just bees. Not only do they help pollinate flowers, they are predators to some of the most annoying garden pests. I think I've counted at least 7 different wasp species in my garden this summer, they've done a great job keeping the larger pest populations manageable.
Tarantula Hawk
Wasp equivalent of an A-10 Warthog
Captures tarantulas in a way that resembles Tony Soprano disposing of a body
Doesn't know what the fuck you're staring at and doesn't really care enough to stop what it's doing
Well maybe it would be easier to "Give them some Space" if their pupae didn't completely cut off all their food processing in the fall leading to rampant aggression as they seek out sugary and fermented smells such as beer, fruits, and candy.
I think wasps and hornets are beautiful, fascinating creatures. Most of them don't mess with me even a few inches from a nest. There are one or two species that are looking for war and get the spray.
Honest question: how do the typical bees (the big ones used for honey production) negatively affect native bee populations? Competition for polen?
You basically got it. European honey bees consume the already dwindling nectar and pollen resources for North American native pollinators. Furthermore, European honey bees are also worse at actually pollinating North American flowers because they did not co-evolve with the species we have here.
They're problematic even in their native range because people keep too many of them and they compete with other important pollinators, often other bee species. Honey bees don't pollinate all species they take pollen and nectar from and those species are then not visited by their specialised pollinators, leading to decrease in numbers of both plants and pollinators.
Arent those conflicting statements? How can they be taking up all the pollen AND be worse pollinators?
They are not conflicting but I can see how you might think that. Pollen is plant sperm. In order for pollination to occur many plants have special needs. The pollen has to be "picked up" and transferred to the female stigma. One example of how honeybees take nectar but don't pollinate flowers are flowers that require "buzz pollinating".
Hope that clears things up. Happy to answer anymore questions (I am just someone who is passionate about nature I'm not a professional or anything).
Just because you waste 80% of the food you get doesn't mean you can't still be twice as fast as everyone else at getting new food!
Do the flowers get pollinated? That seems like the important part.
They often don't. Honey bees are surprisingly good at collecting pollen of many plant species without transfering it to other flowers and pollinating them.
This is just what they want you to believe
Should I start calling yellow jackets wasps, or are they just a type of wasp?
They are of the genus vespa thus are wasps
they're evil wasps, the average wasp is just a standard flying insect with a weird abdomen and propensity for parasitizing other horrid creatures.
I hope somebody can help me with this: could a bee theoretically evolve to have a stronger stinger so that stinging a human's skin multiple times would be possible?
If bees would evolve like other animals those who survive stinging humans would produce more offspring, but in this case only the queen produces offspring and the queen probably contact with human skin so this trait wouldn't be favoured by evolution. Or am I looking at this wrong?
You also need to consider the overall health of the colony, since if the colony dies/gets outcompeted by other colonies, so will the queen
Thanks, that is a factor I hadn't thought of
Huh, this post has 2 examples of bees that can do that already.
I saw these all the time as a kid, but I rarely do anymore. I still see other wasps somewhat often.
Here in NZ most wasps are European Wasps which are an invasive species and are very destructive to the local ecosystem
Wait, wasps are pollinators too?
Yes, they are! They're into sweet nectar - that's why they also tend to visit our sweet drinks. The adults also sometimes search for bits of meat for the carnivorous larvae. In this mode they act like insect pest control.
There are a lot of different species which serve as pollinators besides bees. Afaik, some are more specialised into specific flowers/plants than others and without them, these plants wouldn't be able to reproduce. (Yucca moths for example.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproductive_coevolution_in_Ficus
Looks like their entire life is fucking and then dying immediately after. Aight, they can have a pass. Mainly because I'll never see one in my life.
Yeah. They usually pollinate my sweet toast in spring and my ham in late summer.
Wasp nest in wall, specialist comes out, sucks them all out, sprays commercial insecticide into wall cavity. Wasps that were out of nest at the time come back and get confused and piss off, couple days later they're back and have found new unbefore seen holes to fly into, specialist tells me to buy trap and fill with meat. Buy canned ham and dump in trap. All wasps that came back are now in trap. Thanks Ham.
Once I was spraying a hive of hornets. One of them collapses outside of the next and another flew grabbed him and pulled him back into the nest. Fucking broke my heart.
In my limited experience I can confirm that at least some kinds of wasps are more than chill even directly near their nests.
Some are not even heavily interested in human food and in multiple occations they landed on my hands, cleaned their legs and flew away again.
In the last few years we had at least three nests within the roof of the house without an issue.
Bees and wasps are the same, we just abuse bees for honey and they are liked for that reason alone.
Abuse me for honey