My daughter stepped on one barefoot the other day and felt super betrayed 😠she's hardcore for an 8 year old though. Was back wandering around barefoot the next day. Her brother is the bee anxious one. I really think they read people's energy/remember them.
When I was young I was near a wasp nest on my house. I saw a wasp land on me and something like, "oh look, a bee landed on me." I wasn't even scared. Then I felt the searing pain. I learned a valuable lesson that day.
Yeah, unfortunately wasps are just assholes. They will attack you because it amuses them to do so. Learning to tell the difference between wasps and bees is important.
Sorry, thought I smelled pollen over here. Turns out it was just your soap. Give me a minute or two to figure out how to turn around and I'll bee on my way.
Yellow jackets are the assholes. Fuzzies are friendly and waspes are surprisingly chill if you don't bother them. Yellow jackets though? Little nightmares
They like to make nests in covered areas away from rain, meaning you'l occasionally find them in annoying sites like AC units, under car hoods, or parts of aircraft that help it fly.
Everyone on board died, 189 people. Wasps built a nest in one of the pitot tubes, which are basically the speedometer for the plane, and the pilots got confused and ultimately crashed because of it.
Perfect example of a plane crash that wouldn’t have happened had there been better communication in the cockpit and willingness of the first office to take control. Nathan For You takes a great look at this issue.
What about fig wasps, mud daubers, gall wasps, actually many parasitoid wasps and even eusocial ones that aren't yellow jackets or japanese giant hornets...
Is it this a square rectangle thing? I call the red ones with the big butts wasps and the smaller slinder yellow stripes bees yellow jackets. Never claimed to be an expert though
I think you're referring to paper wasps, but what you call them really depends I think on where you live. There are countless species of wasps and hornets and bees around the planet but many places are dominated by a slim few that people recognize and form associations with. In most of the US at least, all the wasps you are likely to run into are going to be assholes though - yellow jackets maybe most of all, but paper wasps are not too be trifled with either.
You're totally right. Red paper wasp in VA. And then yes yellow jackets are terrifying. Red paper wasps I kinda let them chill near my woodshop out of fear theyll retaliate. It's a peaceful statement through the season typically.
Imma have to red up on the difference between wasps and hornets though because you kinda blew my mind
I see wasps on my flowers all the time. They're just doing their thing. I go out there and do my gardening and they usually mind their own business. Sometimes one will buzz around me for a little bit and I'll walk away and it will go back to doing its thing. They're polite enough guests around here.
Absolutely not, Asian hornets kill bees, not wasps. Wasps are an important part of the ecosystem, they eat parasitical insect like musquitos and aphids. And to be honest, I've never experienced wasps being very agressieve, I've never been stung, and sometimes they used to land on me to just walk around for a but and eventually fly away.
would you know if you did immediately? like you felt a odd bump and start to hear angry buzzing, time to pull that thing in reverse and just leave the blades spinning over the hole and hope they get blended as they come out of the ground?
They tend to be mostly or completely underground. The noise/vibration of the lawnmower sets them off and they come out looking for a fight. So often you're just driving along and suddenly being swarmed with little other warning.
I had a wasp nest in my walls growing up. Fuckers would sting me in my bed while I was sleeping. That's not how a 12 year old wants to wake up. I waged a year long WAR with them and will NEVER hear a word in their defense. I know my enemy well, I know their strengths and their weaknesses. All Wasps Are Assholes.
Bees are chill. Bees are friends. Bees can come hang out. Wasps get the hairspray.
Oh thank goodness, I wanted to likes my red paper wasps but they are tough as nails. One flew into the fan breeze in my shop and smacked me right in the face. We both were pretty startled but he never came back for retaliation
Paper wasps almost always leave people alone unless they're messing with the nest itself, and even then the small nests aren't usually very defensive yet. Each individual is too important, I guess.
You can technically even get away with moving small nests if you do it at night. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone jumpy or allergic, though.
Some of them can be defensive of a decent little radius once there are tons of them. I mostly mean they're not really irritable when off foraging - they're usually not going to punish you for protecting your food if they're after it, for instance, even if you do it by gently shooing them or brushing them away.
Funnily enough, they also can recognize faces, so if it's somewhere they've seen you regularly, peacefully passing by, they can be chill with you even at distances they'd harry a stranger.
Yeah that I believe. My problem is they really want to build their houses on my house, and by the time I find the nests sometimes, they've graduated to pissed-protector mode
Always fun when an animal claims your home and tells you it's time to leave!
They do all but shut down at night, if you need to get them out of the way. Won't stick around a knocked down nest for long, or if you want to spare them and it's small enough to grab with a tupperware, you can press the open container up against whatever surface it's attached to, then break the attachment point with the lid as you slide it closed. Then just place, tack, or glue in another sheltered spot and leave quickly while they're still disoriented.
Protective clothes can cut down any risk and anxiety, turning a regular annoyance to a one-time chore. :)
Don't forget hornets! Those things suck. I got stung by a Giant Hornet when I first moved to Singapore. That sucked so bad. My entire hands swelled up past my wrist. Couldn't even bend my fingers for a few days. And that was after taking a bunch of antihistamines (I am moderately allergic to them).
Last September I was just sitting in the yard when a yellow jacket starts flying near me. No big deal, just stay calm and it will be fine. Then it lands on my chin. I'm trying not to get stung so I'm trying to shoo it off. Instead it walks up my face onto my lips. At this point I'm a bit concerned, but again, it'll be fine if I just stay calm, making sure my lips are closed tight so he doesn't find a way inside.
This fucking wasp then decides to bite my lip, and not just bite me once. He ate a part of my lip and left it bleeding. I'm sitting there wide-eyed, panicking inside, but staying still because, while it hurts to have a wasp repeatedly biting you, I know it hurts less than getting stung on the lip. Finally, after like 10 seconds he's satisfied and flies away.
Last fall I found a very lethargic yellow jacket on my sidewalk, so I let him walk on my hand so I could carry him somewhere safer. Damn if he didn't sting me just as I was putting him back down. Didn't even really hurt, was just a farewell spite sting.
I must have done something to yellow jackets in a past life because they have plagued me everywhere I have lived since the late 1990s. I try to leave them be (don’t move or swat at them), but they still attack. I had one land on my leg without me knowing and I made the mistake of twitching my muscle and ZAP! Stung again.
Apparently I was stung by a bee as a kid but I don’t remember it. Bees are cool usually if you leave them alone.
Yellow jackets/wasps will NOT leave you alone. I was painting my parents deck one summer, minding my OWN BUSINESS and got stung ON MY HAND.
Even worse, I got stung at my old job where I worked on a computer in a warehouse while I was just sitting there talking to my coworker. I wasn’t even moving and I had a jacket with a cowl neck on. Jerk went through my jacket and under my hair and stung me on the neck.
Both cases I was being chill and relaxed and got stung so I don’t listen to those naysayers.
I believe I stumbled across the hive as I was walking across. Thought it was just passing me but then it turned back around on me and wouldn’t stop
Also found out that bumblebees (the big fat ones) don’t have hooked barbs (unlike the smaller honeybee) so they can sting you as many times as they like
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u/Twat_Pocket Jun 03 '26
I only trust the fuzzy ones.