Bees and wasps have many differences.
Because they both fly and have stingers, it's easy to confuse bees and wasps. But when one stings a person, it's important to know which is which, since it may mean a poisonous stinger is still in the person's skin, or that more bees are on their way to help out their comrade.
Physical Characteristics
Getting in close to get a better look at these flying insects will give you the opportunity to observe several differences between bees and wasps. Bees look "fuzzy," having hairy legs and a round body, while wasps have a smooth cylindrical body and legs. Bees have flat and wide legs round and waxy legs.
Behavior
One of the most noted behaviors of bees and wasps both are stinging. When bees need to protect themselves or their hives, they use poison in their stingers, which are sharp and pointy. These stingers stay in the skin after a person has been stung because it has been ripped from the bee's body. This causes great stress to the bee and ultimately results in its death. Since wasps are predators, they are usually more aggressive and are easily provoked. When a wasp sees danger, it stings with its smooth stinger, which easily comes out of the skin, so it can sting repeatedly. Wasps can release pheromones that alert its family, which will come out of the nest and attack the person who hurt it.
Habitat
Bees live in colonies, which can house up to 40,000 bees at its annual peak in spring. There is only one queen in the colony, many thousands of worker bees, and drones, depending on the point of the cycle in the colony. The workers build honeycomb made of beeswax into a densely packed matrix of hexagonal cells. In these cells the bees store pollen---their food---or they house the brood or developing bees (eggs, larvae and pupae). Wasps do not produce wax, rather they make a paper-like substance from wood pulp that they gather from weathered wood by chewing it and mixing it with saliva. They then rear their brood in the combs. More often, wasp nests are burrows made in soil or plant stems from mud.
Feeding Habits
Bees are known as pollinators, meaning they collect pollen and sip nectar. Anywhere there are flowers, there tends to be bees, since flowers depend upon pollination to reproduce and bees depend upon the flower's pollen to survive. Wasps are predators that eat other insects, such as caterpillars and flies. They do occasionally sip on nectar, too, and are often attracted to sugary human foods such as soda or beer.
Tags: wasps have, depend upon, while wasps, while wasps have