Among the insects flying in the meadow, there are three genera that a person encounters quite often in his life: the bee, the wasp and the bumblebee. It's difficult to confuse them. They vary greatly in color and size. But sometimes this is possible if you do not delve into the details of the color of a large insect that has flown into the window. We are accustomed to the fact that the bumblebee is the largest of these three species, but the predatory wasp - the hornet - is much larger, and the body length of some bumblebees is less than that of a bee. Therefore, you will have to understand in more detail how a wasp, a bee and a bumblebee differ from each other, and how they are similar.
Lifestyle
Insects also differ in their lifestyle:
Domestication and Taming:
Wasps also live in groups, where responsibilities are clearly distributed between them. Sometimes they prefer to live as hermits. Their nest is round, as if made of thin crumpled paper. In fact, they prepare it from rotten wood and dry plants.
Dirt and small debris are used to build the nest. They attach their nests to the walls of a house, large tree branches, thick grass, even in a thick plant stem, a discarded mitten, or a piece of cardboard.
Differences
Bee, bumblebee and wasp
There are much more signs by which you can determine who is flying around. Using them, it is unmistakably possible to recognize whether an insect belongs to a particular family.
In the first place is “hairiness”. In terms of hairiness, the rating of insects looks like this:
- Bumblebee.
- Bee.
- Wasp.
Large wasps and small bumblebees are easy to confuse even by color. Among these unrelated insects, there are species that are similar in color and arrangement of markings. But wasps are always “bald”.
The bee occupies an intermediate place in terms of hairiness and often also appears “bald” to the inattentive observer. In fact, it has bristles, but they are short and sparse.
Behavior
A wasp and a bee can live in a group, accumulating up to several thousand individuals and alone. The queen begins to build a wasp's nest; first she builds one layer, then the rest. She then mates once with the drone and begins laying larvae, providing food.
At the beginning of summer, the female lays larvae, from which sterile individuals hatch. Closer to autumn, the larvae from which individuals will emerge are capable of reproduction. They develop in a cell, feeding on pre-prepared immobilized insects. Sometimes wasps lay larvae in the body of large beetles. During its development, its status gradually increases. She starts with cleaning the nest and ends with getting food. In autumn, all ordinary individuals and drones freeze, leaving only the queen alive.
In a bee swarm there is also a clear division of responsibilities. Some individuals deliver nectar to the hive. Others put nectar in honeycombs, while others clean the hive of dead individuals. There are cell cleaners, caring for babies and guards who stand at the entrance, the job is to not let strangers through. Defenders protect the home from attackers, these include humans and bears.
Each ordinary worker gradually goes through all the stages of the listed works throughout her life. This is how nature prescribed it. The young individual begins by cleaning the honeycomb. Then she produces milk and begins feeding the queen and young larvae. Then the bee feeds the older larvae with beebread. Then it takes nectar from collecting bees, or stores it in cells. Then the time comes for her to remove the garbage, when her wax glands begin to work, she begins to build and plug the honeycomb. After the 18th day, the glands that produce poison begin to act, then they are trusted to protect the hive.
The bee colony accumulates a supply of beebread for the winter months and for inclement summer days. Closer to autumn, when there is little food, they destroy the drones.
The queen flies out into the wild to mate. In free flight, she chooses a more viable male, sometimes from another hive.
Insect food and habitat
Among wasps, there are predators and herbivores. Depending on the species, wasps feed on a wide variety of foods: aphids, pollen, nectar, insects, and fruit juice. Predatory wasps catch their prey and paralyze them with venom.
Wasps live everywhere, not found only in the Arabian Peninsula, the Arctic and the Sahara. The conditions necessary for the life of bees are noticeably different: insects require plant resources with fruit trees, pastures, fields with industrial and grain crops (sunflower, buckwheat).
Advice! The closer the apiary is to urban agglomerations, the higher the likelihood of the presence of chemical elements in the form of heavy metals in honey. In search of nectar, the bee flies long distances.
Productivity in honey collection largely depends on the amount of brood raised by workers. The flight speed of a bee with a filled crop is 30-40 km/h. During intensive work, the amount of nectar collected by a bee family is 10-12 kg.
A worker bee makes 26 flights per day. The bee's mass is not stable. During the first flight, the mass of the bee is 0.122 g, in flight - 0.120 g, and in the old flight - 0.108 g.
The lifespan of a bee born in the fall can be 7-8 months, and a bee born in the summer can be up to 6 weeks. But the lifespan of insects can be regulated if the family has lost its queen for some reason.
To find their way home, bees navigate by the position of the Sun, the landscape, and keep a map of the path in their memory. The senses of smell and touch help them navigate in conditions of absolute darkness.
The difference between a bee and a wasp is not only external. By their way of life, bees are workers, working for the benefit of the family. By collecting nectar from flowers, they produce many useful products:
- honey;
- royal jelly;
- wax.
Many of them are used in the pharmaceutical industry (bee venom). Wasps are not capable of producing useful products, and they build honeycombs from waste.
Bees feed exclusively on pollen, while the diet of wasps is varied and includes an abundance of foods
Very often in the garden you can find them on ripe apples or peaches, and inadvertently get stung
Nest arrangement
Bees build their hive from wax (they secrete it themselves), making strictly symmetrical honeycombs inside. Domestic bees live in special houses that beekeepers build for them. A hive of wild bees can be located in a hollow tree or in a crevice of a steep rock.
Wasps make their home from parchment, which is made by chewing wood or other plant cellulose. Their hive is round in shape, gray in color, and looks papery. Wasps attach the hive to the branches of a tree or the ceilings of rarely visited buildings, and sometimes they build it in the ground.
The nest of bumblebees is called a bombidarium; insects make it in burrows of small animals, hollows, and abandoned bird nests. Bumblebees, like bees, build the first cells of their nest with wax. To construct subsequent cells, they use capsules of already hatched larvae.
Anatomy
Bee has
digestive and respiratory organs, lymphatic system, genital organs located in the abdominal part.
The abdomen has the shape of an egg, the uterus has an oblong abdomen, and the drones have a blunt end. Consists of segments representing a ring of two halves. Drones have seven segments, while other individuals have six. The sting is located between the last segments.
Bee digestive system
consists of three sections; digestion itself occurs when food moves through the channel.
The open lymphatic system is filled with hemolymph and liquid matter. The organs of the system include blood vessels and a 5-chambered heart.
The respiratory organs have air sacs without a chitinous lining inside and a tracheal system with holes in the rings that open depending on the state of the insect and the degree of load.
The nervous system includes systems
: central, peripheral, vegetative.
The weight of a bee depends on its functions in the colony. A honey bee weighs 0.1 g, a queen bee weighs 0.25 g.
The oral apparatus includes the upper and lower lips, paired upper and lower jaws. Bees use their proboscis to collect nectar.
Wasp mouthparts
, unlike a bee, serves to chop plants used by insects to build nests or as food.
Behavior in stressful situations
It is important for everyone to know that the behavior of these insects depends on the influence of various factors. You can anger both some insects and others. Bees always protect their hive, which contains the queen. In case of penetration into the hive, the bees immediately, as a whole family, come to the defense. Wasps act in much the same way and if their nest is attacked, you can get numerous bites. There is an opinion that wasps can attack just like that, but this is rather a myth. They sting only if they are provoked, otherwise wasps can fly and not hurt anyone. In any case, you need to be careful with both bees and wasps.
Interesting Facts
These insects are interesting because:
- A worker bee can transmit information to its relatives about the location of the object from which it obtains food.
- Bees, after fertilizing the queen with males, rush at them and expel them from the colony. Then they quickly die because they cannot provide themselves with food.
- Bumblebees are the first to appear on flowers and the first to pollinate plants.
- Wasps can also produce honey, but no one has ever seen it. At the bottom of the cell there is a microscopic volume of honey. This is necessary so that the larvae have something to eat at first. After this, they switch to a diet of protein foods.
- The hornet is a true predator that prefers to feed on live insects.
Each insect has its own advantages and disadvantages. Unfortunately, many people unwisely destroy insects, although there are no absolutely useless living creatures in nature. If some species disappear, humanity simply will not be able to survive.
Nature of the bites
The wasp stings are much more painful, but the nature of the bites has its own similarities.
As mentioned above, wasps can sting several times. At the same time, there is a risk of infection, since wasps often visit places where there is complete unsanitary conditions. As for the bee, the sting is not so dangerous, since the only thing bees do is collect nectar from flowers - honey plants.
Every person should be able to provide first aid for wasp and bee stings. Ignorance of these rules, as well as illiterate actions, can harm human health. This is especially true for people prone to allergies, young children, expectant mothers and people with poor health.
As a result of a bee or wasp sting, the following characteristic signs appear:
In cases where the human body is hypersensitive, the reaction may be as follows:
Anaphylactic reactions occur if the degree of intoxication of the body is more severe:
Who bites harder?
Hornets and wasps are the most aggressive; they have a thin sting with which they pierce the skin deeply several times. The bite is painful and burning, the affected area swells greatly. This may cause an allergic reaction. Wasps are also able to give a signal for the entire swarm to join them. These insects continue to live after being bitten.
It is difficult to anger a bee, but it leaves a sting in the body, striking only once, and subsequently dies. Bees sting only in extreme danger. Their bite is not so painful.
The most benevolent of all is the bumblebee; he attacks in exceptional cases. Its bite is less painful. Only the female has a sting; she does not lose it, and sometimes bites several times. A bumblebee sting can cause severe allergies and fever, and is especially dangerous for children.
Who stings more
Not every person can objectively assess painful sensations. Not everyone has been bitten by both animals. American entomologist Justin Schmidt asked this question and decided to compare the sensations obtained from the bites of various insects. Over the course of several years, the scientist subjected himself to attacks by several thousand insects, after which he recorded his observations and sensations. After his experiments, he invented the scale. According to this scale, a wasp sting is like burning the tip of your tongue with a cigarette. He compared a bee sting to a skin burn from an open fire. Schmidt notes that in most cases a wasp sting is more unpleasant, but the peculiarity of a bee sting is that, due to the teeth, the sting gradually goes deeper and deeper into the skin, prolonging the painful sensation.
Coloring
It is quite easy to distinguish a bee from a bumblebee and a wasp by the degree of color: the first is always dark brown. The stereotype of striped honey collectors comes from cartoons. You can compare photos of a bee and a bumblebee. The differences will be immediately noticeable.
The other two insects can have not only striped, but also almost uniform coloring. For example, glitter wasps are iridescent, and typhias are solid black. But usually people only consider wasps to be insects with black and yellow stripes on their bodies. This does not prevent representatives of other families from also biting painfully and sometimes being more dangerous.
Bite symptoms
Externally, the manifestations are practically no different. It is difficult to assess the degree of pain, if a wasp or bee stings for the first time, a person has nothing to compare with. The bite looks like this:
A photo of a bee or wasp sting is shown below. You can carefully examine all the features of the traces of an attack by striped insects.
On a note!
If a wasp or bee stings in the leg, injects poison into the arm, the entire limb swells. If you are bitten on the neck, face, or tongue, the likelihood of swelling of the larynx increases. In severe cases, Quincke's edema develops. In the absence of qualified help, a person risks dying. If you are bitten by bees or attacked by a swarm of wasps, the dose of poison in the blood increases significantly and anaphylactic shock may occur.
A severe allergic reaction provokes:
At home, it is allowed to treat a wasp or bee sting in case of a local allergic reaction. If you experience deterioration in your health, difficulty breathing, or swelling of the larynx, you should immediately call an ambulance or go to a sanitary checkpoint accompanied by other people.
First aid for a bee or wasp sting
After an insect attack, you need to take certain actions to avoid complications and reduce allergies.
- Rinse the wound with clean cold water. The procedure will help wash away any remaining poison and remove dirt. At home, use laundry soap.
- Disinfect. They use ammonia, medical alcohol, and boric alcohol. And also hydrogen peroxide, a medicinal herbal tincture of medicinal herbs.
- Neutralize the effect of the poison. Use vinegar and citric acid. To prepare the solution, add 1 teaspoon of vinegar or 0.5 teaspoon of acid to a glass of water. They wipe the sore spot, make lotions and compresses. If it is not possible to prepare a solution, apply a piece of sugar for 5 minutes.
- Don't let the poison spread. Ice cubes or cold objects are applied to the bite site for 5 minutes - a bottle of water, meat from the freezer, a heating pad. Cold constricts blood vessels, prevents the spread of poison, and also relieves swelling and eliminates pain.
- Reduce inflammation. You can treat the bite with a decoction or tincture of calendula, chamomile, or valerian. Or they use pharmaceutical drugs.
If you have a severe allergic reaction, you need to take an antihistamine as quickly as possible. Be sure to take medicine for multiple bites, if a wasp or bee stings you on the neck or face.
What not to do about bee and wasp stings
Many people misunderstand this situation, which can cause serious damage to the human body. As a rule, a person is overcome by panic and, as a result, wrong actions that can lead to negative consequences.
So, what not to do:
You can't just lie there. An acceptable option is a half-sitting position. In this position, the load on the heart is minimal, and in case of vomiting, the person cannot be harmed.
It is not at all difficult to distinguish a bee from a wasp. If we talk about benefits, then the bee brings more benefits, although wasps also have their purpose and take their place in the ecosystem. It is wrong to say that wasps are useless insects. Both will bite if you anger them or interfere with their living space. If you do not provoke insects, they will not attack humans. Sometimes it is the person himself who is to blame for being bitten by insects. For some reason they think they won't get hurt.
Under certain conditions, both a wasp and a bee can bite. In such cases, you need to know what to do. In most cases, when the human body reacts adequately to insect bites, the bites go away on their own. The only problem is children who can scratch the bite site and then secondary infection is possible, as well as people prone to allergies. However, they should always have antihistamines with them. The main thing in such a situation is not to get confused, otherwise unpredictable consequences are possible.
Differences between bees and wasps and bumblebees
Of course, the first difference that catches your eye when you see these representatives is the color of the body. Wasps have quite bright colors, one might say provocative. Bumblebees are much darker in color and also have a large rounded body, while wasps have a “famous” waist.
The diet of bees and hornets includes pollen and nectar, which they collect with the help of their proboscis. But wasps are omnivores, except for pollen and nectar, they do not refuse fruit juice, and other small insects, in addition, they attack hives to taste honey. When attacking, they often use large, powerful jaws, with which they easily kill their prey.
Folk remedies
Symptoms disappear completely within a week. All this time the sore spot hurts and itches. To speed up tissue regeneration, folk remedies are used. They are also used if it is not possible to treat the wound with professional antiseptics.
On a note!
The juices of potatoes, carrots, beets, lemon, and grapefruit have anti-inflammatory properties. They make compresses, lotions, and simply wipe the wound.
Medicines for a normal reaction to a bee or wasp sting
They use a product based on natural ingredients, herbal extracts, and essential oils.
If no improvement in the condition of the skin is observed within 2 days, agents are used to reduce the activity of histamines.
Treatment for wasp sting allergy
An allergic reaction to a bee or wasp sting has quite acute and quickly manifested symptoms. In this case, you need to act quickly in order to slow down the spread of toxins as much as possible and neutralize their effect on the body.
The victim is given an antihistamine that suppresses the development of the allergic process. It can be:
The drugs are taken in the dosage and frequency prescribed by the doctor. Medicines such as Erius, Eden, Claritin, Kestin are indicated for children.
In addition to antiallergic medications, special ointments and gels will help to relieve swelling from a wasp sting:
These products also have an antihistamine effect, relieve redness and swelling, and relieve itching.
It is possible to use hormonal drugs, for example, Fluorocort or Diprosalic, but you need to take into account possible side effects.
It is also advisable to prescribe adsorbent drugs:
These drugs bind toxins and quickly remove them from the blood, thereby cleansing the body of poison.
In case of severe manifestations of allergies, the victim will be helped by:
The victim is urgently hospitalized and provided with all necessary care in a hospital setting.
When to seek help from doctors
You should immediately call an ambulance if:
