Bee or wasp? How to tell them apart, and what to do if you get stung 🍇

The honey bee is stocky and densely hairy, with a dull, brownish-orange colour and less sharp stripes. You can often see a coloured lump of pollen on its hind legs. It goes from flower to flower collecting nectar and pollen – it’s rarely interested in human food, except for sweet things.

The most common wasps in Hungary, such as the common wasp and the German wasp, are almost hairless and shiny, with a bright yellow-and-black pattern and a clearly visible “wasp waist”. Flying with dangling legs is only typical of paper wasps; most wasps tuck their legs against their body, so this isn’t a reliable sign. The European hornet is much bigger, brownish-red and yellow, and flies even at dusk – and on moonlit nights.

Unlike a bee colony, a wasp colony only lives for one year. In spring and early summer, the workers mostly hunt insects, because the larvae need protein. By late summer the colony stops growing, but the wasps need a lot of sugar: that’s when they appear on fallen fruit, at bins, on soft-drink cans and at market stalls. In winter the colony dies, and only the young, mated queens survive; in spring they start new nests.

A honey bee colony, on the other hand, lives on from year to year, getting through the cold of winter huddled in a cluster – you can read more in our article on the life of a honey bee colony.

Wasps are actually useful: as predators they eat aphids and caterpillars, and according to a 2021 scientific review they have been observed visiting the flowers of nearly a thousand plant species.

A worker bee’s sting is barbed, so it gets stuck in human skin. When the bee tries to fly off, the sting tears out of its body together with the venom sac, and the bee dies. A wasp’s sting is smooth, so it can sting several times.

A bee sting left in the skin keeps pumping venom for roughly half a minute to a minute, so the most important thing is to get it out as quickly as possible. Health advice says to scrape it out sideways with a fingernail or the edge of a card, not with tweezers. A small 1996 experiment found that speed matters more than method – so don’t go looking for tweezers, scrape it out straight away.

Most stings hurt, turn red and swell up, but settle down within a few days. According to an allergist at Semmelweis University in Budapest, 0.4–0.8% of children and about 3% of adults are allergic to bee or wasp venom, and for them a single sting can cause a severe reaction. What to do first:

A few simple rules:

A swarm of bees is collected by a beekeeper – you can read about this in a separate article. Removing a wasp nest, however, is a job for pest control, not for a beekeeper. The website of OMME, the Hungarian Beekeepers’ Association, has contact lists for both (in Hungarian).

The Asian hornet, which is on the EU list of invasive species, was first caught in Hungary in August 2023, in Kimle, a village in the north-west of the country. According to the Hungarian Natural History Museum, it’s no more dangerous to people than the native European hornet, but it readily hunts honey bees. OMME has been monitoring it with a network of traps since 2024, and nationwide from 2026. No further occurrence in Hungary has been confirmed since: not a single specimen was caught in the traps in the 2025 season, and reports from the public all turned out to be European hornets.

Two common misconceptions: