If It Is a Bee, We Will Tell You

The quick test

Shiny and Angular, or Furry and Round

You can separate these without getting close.

A wasp is smooth and shiny, almost hairless, with a hard bright-yellow and black pattern and a waist so narrow it looks like a design fault. It looks built.

A honeybee is smaller, furrier and much browner — amber and dark brown bands rather than yellow and black, with a fuzzy thorax. At a distance a honeybee reads as brown; a wasp reads as yellow.

A bumblebee is unmistakable once you have the comparison: big, round, very furry, and usually slow and loud.

Behaviour helps as much as appearance. A wasp in August is interested in your food and your drink. A bee is interested in flowers and will not investigate a plate of ham.

Honeybee swarms

A Beekeeper, and Usually for Nothing

A swarm is a dramatic thing to find: many thousands of bees arriving at once, then settling into a hanging cluster the size of a rugby ball on a branch, a fence post, a wall or a car wing mirror.

Two things worth knowing. A swarm is a colony moving house, and it is usually gone within a day or two of its own accord once the scouts find a permanent home. And swarming bees are about as docile as bees ever get, because they have no nest and no stores to defend and they are full of honey.

The right call is a local beekeeper. The British Beekeepers Association runs a swarm collector list by area, and most collectors will take a swarm for nothing, because a free colony is worth having. That is not a service a pest control firm can compete with and there is no reason to try.

What a beekeeper generally will not do is take bees out of a cavity wall or a chimney, because that is building work rather than beekeeping. If you have honeybees established in a structure, say so when you ring and we will talk through what is actually involved rather than treating it as a wasp job.

Bumblebees

Leave Them, They Will Be Gone By August

Bumblebees nest in small numbers — often a few dozen to a couple of hundred, against several thousand for a wasp colony — in compost heaps, under decking, in old bird boxes, in loft insulation and in tussocky grass.

They are not aggressive, they very rarely sting, and the colony dies out naturally by late summer exactly as a wasp colony does. The nest is not reused.

So the honest advice is to leave them. If the entrance is somewhere genuinely impossible — directly in a doorway used by a child who reacts badly to stings — ring and we will talk it through, but the answer will usually still be to wait.

Solitary bees

The Ones in the Mortar and the Lawn

Every spring somebody finds dozens of small bees coming out of holes in the mortar of a south-facing wall, or out of little volcano-shaped mounds in a lawn, and reasonably assumes it is an infestation.

It is not. These are solitary bees — mason bees, mining bees and their relatives. Each female has her own hole. There is no colony, no queen and nothing to defend, which is why they are essentially incapable of being a problem: most cannot sting through human skin and none of them are inclined to try.

They are also excellent pollinators and the activity lasts a few weeks. Mason bees in mortar do not cause the damage people assume either — they use holes that are already there, and mortar that is soft enough to excavate was already failing.

Why we say all this

The Booking We Turn Down

It would be easy to attend, treat, invoice and never mention that it was bumblebees. Plenty is treated every year that should have been left, usually because nobody asked the question at the door.

So the question gets asked on the phone instead. Tell us the colour, the size and what they are interested in, and if the answer is bees you will get told so, with the name of who to ring instead, and it will not cost you anything.

If it is wasps, it is £90 and we will come and deal with it.

Short answers

Wasp Questions

Going further

Wasp Guides