Stinging Insect Removal in Tucson

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When we think of bees, we think first of honeybees, with their distinct yellow and black stripes on their abdomen. Their colors and their slender shape are more or less uniform across the species. Bumblebees are usually more fat and furry, with stripes that are more obscure and dark in hue. The tip of their abdomen is rounded while that of the honeybee is clearly sharp.

Honeybees don’t hibernate but keep warm in their nests and live off stored food, so don’t let your guard down during the winter; you might find a few stray worker bees. As for bumblebees, the queen hibernates and then gets busy building a nest in the spring. Honeybees love wall cavities, so they’re known to nest inside of homes. Bumblebees are ground-nesting bees, so they make nests underground, usually in bare patches of soil. If you accidentally step over one, that could spell trouble.

Both bees sting, but only queens and worker bees. Honeybees are the only bees that sting once and die; their stings are barbed and tear away from their abdomen. Every other stinging insect can sting as often as it pleases. The venom from any insect sting can cause anaphylactic shock, a sometimes life-threatening allergic reaction.

Wasps

While honeybees and bumblebees are not naturally aggressive, the wasp is. The common wasp is thin and more elongated than a honeybee, with clearly defined yellow and black stripes, long legs, and a sharply sculpted face. Most wasps are solitary, not living in colonies but foraging out on their own and feeding on other insects. They do help with pollination, though, and they benefit our crops by eating agricultural pests.

The ones we’re familiar with are the social wasps: paper wasps, yellow jackets, and hornets especially. Yellow jackets come with shorter legs than the average paper wasp. As for hornets, the bald-faced hornet is the most well known, having an almost entirely black body and a white face. These three create what are called paper nests, though yellow jackets usually go underground, paper wasps make a nest shaped like an upside-down umbrella, and bald-faced hornets make a football-shaped nest. Like honeybees, they like enclosed spaces, so you might find them nesting under the eaves.