FAQ's:

• Bees and wasps are beneficial social insects
• Bees have fuzzy / hairy bodies; wasps don't.
• Bees feed on pollen and nectar from flowers.
• Wasps usually feed on other insects or spiders.
• Bees can only sting one time because they have a barbed stinger, which pulls out the stinger, poison gland and guts.
• Wasps are able to sting repeatedly since they do not have a barbed stinger.

vary in color, they may be brown, black, orange or yellow and their bodies may or may not have stripes. They receive their name from the paper-like nest they build. These nests can be found under the eaves of houses, branches of trees and shrubs, under decks and inside pipes.

• Paper wasps do not have a caste system with a sterile worker class.
• There is one dominant female who lays eggs, and the others tend to the young.
• The dominant female is usually the nest initiator.

Yellowjackets

can nest in wall voids, attics, trees and shrubs, or in the ground. Although Yellowjackets are considered quite beneficial to agriculture since they feed on harmful flies and caterpillars, it is their aggressiveness and painful stinging ability that cause the most concern.

• Social insects.
• Have a worker caste that cares for the young and forages for food.
• Will feed on fruit and nectar from plants.
• Larvae are fed insects or carrion.

Honey Bees

are small and fuzzy, usually yellow and black striped. A typical small hive contains perhaps 20,000 bees and these are divided into three types: Queen, Drone, and Worker.

• Very important in pollination of crops.
• Social insects that live in colonies.
• There is a queen that is responsible for producing eggs.
• The worker caste is made up of sterile females who build and repair the nest, forage for food and tend to the young.
• Males are called drones and are produced for mating with reproductive females.

Carpenter Bees

are large with a fuzzy head and thorax, they are colored yellow and black.  They are often confused with bumble bees. Homeowners often notice large, black bees hovering around the outside of their homes. These are probably carpenter bees searching for mates and favorable sites to construct their nests. Female carpenter bees are quite aggressive, often hovering in front of people who are around the nests. They can inflict a painful sting but seldom will unless they are handled or molested. The males are quite harmless, however, since they lack stingers.

• These bees are solitary and create their nest in wood.
• They create the galleries by chewing through the wood with their mandibles.
• Places "bee bread", a mix of pollen and nectar, in the gallery and then lay an egg. Once the egg hatches, the larvae will feed on the bee bread.