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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I have a fair amount of wasps in my vicinity: mud daubers and paper wasps mostly it seems. They're very inquisitive and curious but not necessarily belligerent. I've never had any problems with them so I generally leave them alone, though I do clean their nests off my house and shed.

*One of the coolest experiences of my life spent outside was watching a tarantula hawk and tarantula engage in mortal combat right in front of my friend and I as we were sitting and relaxing in a park.

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Where I grew up as a kid you were always warned about yellowjackets, not wasps generally. Not knowing how to discern a yellowjacket I guess I was generally wary of wasps, particularly any wasp that was yellowish, but never had the mindset that all wasps were aggressive. A wasp-shaped thing that was black wouldn't have been something I'd think twice about.

What sucks about yellowjackets is that they're easy to dismiss as bees. You can ignore bees; indeed, you should ignore them. Not ignoring bees is how you get stung. Yellowjackets have a reputation for being capricious. Ignoring a yellowjacket is how you get stung, not how you avoid getting stung. At least, that seemed to be the wisdom.

I really don't understand how to mistake a bee for a yellowjacket - they look very different, and about the only thing they have in common are that they fly and some bees have a yellowish color that does not look like the bright yellow.

They sound different, they are build quite different, and they fly differently. Just observing bees on flowers for a few minutes every day in the summer and it's obvious, at least it is to me.

It might even be better to leave the nests because they generally will not re-use a nest, for hygiene reasons apparently.

The worst ones seem to be hornets/yellow jackets. They're aggressive, and want to eat anything that people have.

Vespex. It’s a fantastic tool for removing wasp populations and is working wonders in areas of New Zealand where wasps are really harming native insects and animals.

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