Page "Yellow jacket" Paragraph 2

Yellow jackets, often mistaken for bees as they are similar in size and appearance and both sting, are actually wasps.

( Conversely, Polistes dominula, a species of paper wasp, is very frequently misidentified as a yellow jacket.

) A typical yellow jacket worker is about long, with alternating bands on the abdomen ; the queen is larger, about long ( the different patterns on their abdomens help separate various species ).

Workers are sometimes confused with honey bees, especially when flying in and out of their nests.

Yellow jackets, in contrast to honey bees, are not covered with tan-brown dense hair on their bodies, they do not carry pollen, and do not have the flattened hairy hind legs used to carry it.