StametsHey lil guy
protistThere are thousands of wasp species and the overwhelming majority don’t even have the ability to sting humans. You probably don’t ever even notice them, despite being the most important group of pollinators in the world, because you might mistake them for bees or flies. Also, bees are wasps (and so are ants).
konalt
FreshLightThis is the only correct reply. In case you do not already have the tick version, here you go:
Love it! Do you have one that comes in Spider? Or perhaps House Centipede?
HoimoOh that’s brilliant
Whenever you see posts like this assume that the op is referencing yellow jacket waps, after I started gardening ive learned more about wasps and their part to play in my garden, yellow jacks can suck a dick though. They can go from 0 to 100 real quick and little provocation, I will choose to protect my kids over them.
MaiqOxnard High School team/mascot is the Yellow Jackets. Admittedly they are badass motherfuckers, but it’s a little weird in cheering because most traditional cheers assume two syllables and you wind up yelling “Go Jackets!” like some kind of radical haberdashery
yellow jacks can suck a dick though
I already liked wasps before, you don’t have to sell to me. Different topic though: How do you make them do that?
caseyweedermanYou have to have a really small dick.
AWAB
The motherfuckers that set up shop inside my car definitely had the ability to sting humans.
About the only time I can drop an unironic “source: my ass.”
Between the driver’s door and the B pillar. We had some “bug freeze” spray that fucks up their joints.
When you squash a wasp it releases a chemical from the wasp that attracts people who tell you facts about wasps.
WalleyeWarrior
You dare name one of the ancients? Specifically the Jackdaw?
titanicxKeyword detected:
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ArchEngel
RavingGrobWhile Ants, Bees, Wasps and Hornets are all in the family Hymenoptera, however it is incredibly wrong to suggest that Bees and Ants are Wasps.
They are distinct species that are related to each other.
Sincerely — a pest control technician who is incredibly tired of helping solve “bee” problems, when 99% of the time, they have a Wasp problem.
Yup! Was about to type out a similar reply. To further clarify:
Hymenoptera - order - ants, bees, wasps, hornets
Formicidae - family - ants
Aculeata - infraorder - bees, wasps, hornets
Apidae - family - bees (also bumblebees)
Vespidae - family - wasps, hornets
HeavenlySpoonExcept many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg
If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.
You can’t argue “this looks like a wasp so it is a wasp” and then extend from that to “and because of evolutionary history, all these other things that don’t look like wasps are also wasps”
Defining groups of species with a common word is always going to be ambiguous, but you need to stay consistent in what you use to define it. By the same logic you can argue that humans are fish, because whales clearly are fish if you just look at them, and whales and humans are both mammals.
Sure, but I was responding to someone who was defining wasp (the common word) based on clade (using scientific words).
I’m fine with common parlance words for things. What I had issue with was arbitrarily restricting the definition of wasp to a specific clade, which would exclude ants and bees, and also a whole host of at the very least wasp-adjacent animals which would now be stuck with no real way to describe them.
(Also, yes, fish is a rubbish scientific word. We’re far closer cousins of salmon than sharks are. By any reasonable definition of fish, at least biologically, we are fish. You could redefine “fish” in the same way we define “tree”, i.e. based on structure and not on ancestry, but by that definition whales should still be fish. The word “fish” shouldn’t be allowed within 50 metres of cladistics.)
If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees,
That logic doesn’t check out, given Sapygidae is a family of sapygid wasps belonging to the Aculeata infraorder.
Aculeata is named after its defining feature, which is the modification of the ovipositor into a stinger. This trait doesn’t strictly constitute a wasp, which is why they have their own families (Vespidae, Sapygidae, Pompilidae, Myrmosidae, basically all of the Chrysidoidea superfamily, etc.).
All wasps are aculeate, but not all aculeates are wasps.
Just to confirm, you don’t consider jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?
I’ve mostly seen wasps defined as basically “Apocrita but not the ones we don’t think count as wasps because there’s too many of them, specifically bees and ants.” Which leads to the same weird reasoning that would somehow make legless lizards lizards, but not snakes. I’ve seen velvet ants referred to as wasps, but not ants, even though true ants are far closer cousins to Vespidae. That just isn’t a viable scientific definition. I’m glad we’ve mostly moved on to grouping avian dinosaurs among the dinosaurs, but it feels like a lot of similar groupings are still lagging.
I’m willing to accept Vespidae as generally being wasps, but that excludes a ton of wasps. It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors, which is what makes cladistics so fascinating. So why not just open it up to include all Apocrita and be done with it?
I’m also fine with a morphological definition of wasps, like how “tree” isn’t based on ancestry but on structure, but you were the one pulling in the scientific names.
Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?
Negative, those are all considered wasps alongside Vespidae. I said “that logic doesn’t check out” because what you had essentially said in that previous reply was “if wasp==wasp and wasp==wasp, then so are ants and bees”, which is… well… false.
It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors
That ancestry is pretty much expressed in Formicidae belonging to the Aculeata infraorder, though I do agree that putting them under some sort of vespid superfamily would be even more fitting, since ants pretty much did evolve from wasps.
Why does it matter if you’re called for a bee problem, but it’s wasps? And wouldn’t actual bee problems require a Bee Keeper?
Most of the time: it’s more about the fact that bees are typically harmless, and calling a bee a wasp, to me, is like calling Sprite, Pepsi, because they’re both made by PepsiCo.
And yes, honeybees are a protected species here, meaning we’d need an apiarist to either remove the hive and capture the swarm, or officially tell us that the hive is too large to safely remove, without destroying the home.
In my experience, even the stingy ones aren’t that aggressive. They get pissed if you attack them or their hive and can panick if they get stuck in hair or clothes. I usually just (slowly and gently) “push” them away with my hand if they get too close, like at 10cm/s. They usually give up and move on if they were trying to check me out, or continue on if they were passing by too close. If they are trying to get at my food or drink, they might be a bit more persistant about it, but I haven’t had one get aggressive because of it.
That said, I had an ex that bugs just seemed to hate/love. Apparently house flies can bite (though I still have a feeling that she was bit by a different fly that looks like a house fly, but can’t say for sure because I did see her getting harassed by bugs that just ignored me). So ymmv.