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Apis mellifera, the reigning queen. Image courtesy Daniel Prudek via Shutterstock.
If you ask the average person to describe a bee, they’ll probably recite a shortlist of traits that reads something like this: it’s a bug with a fuzzy body, yellow and black stripes, and a stinger on one end. They might tell you that it makes honey and dances to share directions, or identify the iconic honey bee “buzz.” But what makes a bee a bee and not, say, a wasp? Or a fly?
To talk about the differences between bees and their neighboring species, we first need to establish an understanding of taxonomical classification—that is: the practice of defining a group of creatures as a collective species based on a set of shared characteristics.
Exciting, I know, but I promise it’s not as hard (or as boring) as it sounds.
Back in the 1700s, scientists began concentrating on the identification of plants and animals for the purposes of more fruitful study. Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish biologist credited with designating scientific names to some 9,000 species of plant and animal, established the foundation for the naming convention most scientific institutions use today. It was finessed and modified by later scientists, naturalists, and evolutionary thinkers, like Robert Chambers and various Darwins, until it evolved into the hierarchical system we were taught in grade school.
Quick refresher course for those of you, like myself, who haven’t actively participated in a science class since your late teens: think of taxonomic classification like a telescope. Starting with domain—of which there are only three that encapsulate every plant, animal, mineral, and bacterium on planet Earth—we can narrow our focus down until we’re differentiating between very specific traits.
For example: bees are part of the domain Eukarya and kingdom Animalia, just like humans, because we're both creatures whose cells possess a "true nucleus," and we both breathe air, eat food, and reproduce sexually. That’s about where the similarities stop, so it’s pretty easy to tell us apart.
If you wanted to try and draw the same comparison between a honey bee and, say, a mason bee, you’d have to focus in much closer to see the places where the two differ, narrowing from kingdom down through phylum, class, order, family, genus, and finally species.
An adorably fluffy red mason bee (family Osmia) poses for a close-up. Image courtesy tasnenad via Shutterstock.
Bees are arthropods (phylum Arthropoda), a distinction they share with creatures such as crabs, millipedes, and spiders, among others. Narrowing further, they’re insects (class Insecta)—which means they have a body made up of three regions: head, thorax, and abdomen—of the order Hymenoptera. Named for the clear, membrane-like wings possessed by all the insects it encompasses, Hymenoptera boasts more than 100,000 distinct species and is, from the human perspective, the most beneficial order of the entire insect world.
In short: these are our most accomplished pollinators.
The path continues to diverge from there, into suborder Apocrita, which includes ants, wasps, and 7 separate families of bee made up of over 16,000 individual species.
Hot damn, you may be thinking. That’s a lot of bees!
It is indeed, my friend, and you can find more than 4,000 of them on the North American continent, alone.
If you’ve ever been to a summertime picnic, you’ve probably been dive-bombed by wasps on their way to hijack your tray of cold cuts, or spotted hover flies (yes, flies are pollinators too) floating in place above nearby flowers.
At a glance, any of these might appear to be a bee. They share the bee’s large compound eyes and frequently adopt its striking black-and-yellow color scheme. Bees and wasps in particular share a common ancestor, which can make it difficult to tell one from the other when you’re busy sprinting out of stinging range and trying not to spill soda all over yourself, but a closer look will shed light on the true identity of the interloper throwing a wrench into your afternoon of family fun.
Polistes exclamans, or the common "paper wasp," looking sleek and dangerous as every #girlboss should. Image courtesy Possent psychography via Shutterstock.
Based on fossil dating, bees have been around in basically the same form for about a hundred million years, give or take a few millennia that might make them even older. They likely co-evolved along with flowers, which might help explain the rapid expansion of flowering plants during the Cretaceous period, when the bee was really coming into her own and leaving the wasp in the dust.
I once asked a beloved boss at the artisanal honey company I worked for during college what the difference was between a wasp and a bee. He told me that wasps were bees that never got their act together. (He’s since gone on to bigger and better things, but Sam, if you’re reading this, I miss you!)
I’ve used this nice, concise witticism many times over the years to explain the general gist to a slew of politely uninterested friends, coworkers, and neighbors, but if you want to get technical, the three major differentiators between bees, wasps, and flies are: what they look like, where they live, and what they eat.
Bees always have at least a few branched hairs on their bodies, to allow them to collect pollen to take back to their hive. Even the glam-rock metallic species like the blue orchard bee or the various sweat bees (pictured below) have robust body hair in comparison to flies and wasps. While some flies may also have hairy bodies, wasps, which are carnivorous and more interested in catching other insects to feed their young than gathering pollen, boast only a handful of hairs so small and thin they're essentially invisible to the naked eye.
Bowie ain't got nothing on the sweat bee. Image courtesy Paul Reeves Photography via Shutterstock.
Both bees and wasps possess a classic, hourglass figure with a narrow "wasp waist" or petiole, which allows for greater flexibility and maneuverability. Though flies also have a distinctive head, thorax, and abdomen, like any insect, the sections of their body tend to sit so close that it's difficult, nay impossible, to identify their waist at a glance.
Bees and wasps also tend to have longer geniculate antennae, meaning that their antennae possess a joint that can bend like a human elbow, while flies have short, stubby antennae. If you can see the antennae from where you’re sitting, chances are good you’re looking at a bee or a wasp. In the case of latter, may I recommend that you abandon your fully loaded, perfectly grilled bratwurst to the ravages of nature and make a brisk retreat.
In addition to their two large compound eyes, bees, wasps, and flies also have three simple eyes arranged in a triangle format on the tops of their heads. Though incapable of capturing actual images, these ocelli detect changes in light. Bees and wasps tend to have long, narrow eyes with more space between their eyes and ocelli, while a fly’s eyes are so big, round, and close together, it often looks like they’re touching at the top of their head.
If these physical characteristics are flying by too fast to pinpoint, take a look at your environment for a clue as to your mystery insect’s identity.
A wasp nest on a windowsill. Image courtesy Tanya Bisaillon photos via Shutterstock.
You can find social wasp nests under eaves or in the well sheltered branches of trees, made out of a substance that looks like paper. Social bees like the honey bee, on the other hand, build their hives out of wax and prefer to nest inside a hollow tree or somewhere that provides a protective barrier between the hive and the outside world.
Some solitary bees nest in hollow reeds, or in the ground, not unlike wasps, but these solitary “gregarious” bees—which means they live alone but nearby other bees of the same or similar species—aren’t usually aggressive. Unlike say, the yellow jacket, which builds nests in abandoned rodent burrows and is the last surprise you want to trip over while hiking around in summer shorts.
If you’re not immediately ducking for cover when one of these humming passers-by rushes at you headfirst, you can also get a pretty good idea as to an insect's identity based on whether your uninvited guests are content to drift around the tacky floral centerpiece your mother-in-law insisted on bringing, or whether they make straight for the buffet table.
While their diets share some overlap, almost all bees* feed exclusively on pollen and flower nectar, whereas wasps and flies will branch out into meats, fruits, and other decaying organic matter. I have a friend who leaves a tray of sliced deli meat out in a secluded corner of the garden when she's entertaining to give the wasps and flies their own feast to focus on so they're less interested in barraging her guests. I've never tried it myself, but given that most wasps are more territorial than your average bee, it stands to reason that they might enjoy a private table.
Discounting the infamous “killer bee,” who also viciously guards her personal space, most bees are only interested in determining whether or not you're a flower. They're on a tight timeline to store up as much excess honey as they can before winter, and the acquisition of nectar and pollen is their top priority. They might spend a second or two in your space investigating, but will move on happily enough once they've determined that you have neither to offer. As long as you keep your movements slow and calm, chances are good that you'll escape the encounter sting-free.
Keep these key points in mind and next time an uninvited insect crashes your cookout you may find that there’s no need to eject her from your party. Hell, your camellias might even thank you for letting her stick around!
*The exception being three South American species of Trigona known colloquially as “vulture bees,” which scavenge carrion for protein rather than getting it from pollen like other bees and are some of the more metal bees I’ve come across while delving deep, deep into the bottomless abyss of bee research†.
† See also: beesearch.
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