Visiting a National Trust garden in Norfolk a few years ago, we were fascinated to see quite a few hornets quartering the flower beds. Hornets are our largest social insect, forming colonial nests like their smaller close relatives, the wasps. Hornets have yellow and brown striped abdomens, not yellow and black like a wasp, and in the UK they are found mostly in South-East England. I remember coming across a nest in Kew Gardens, which had been identified by the staff and labelled, also fenced off, but with a suitable vantage point for visitors to watch from. Hornets pack a fairly serious sting, but are in fact much less likely to sting than the smaller wasps - they are pretty even tempered insects.
Anyone seeing a hornet in these parts probably hasn’t. There are, however, a number of other candidates that can be mistaken for them. The first of course is a queen wasp. There are several species of social wasp in the UK and they do vary in size. In Spring only the queens will be seen; they have survived the winter and are now preparing to start a new colony, feeding up and searching out a suitable site. They are of course much larger than the worker wasps, and can easily be mistaken for hornets - except that their abdomens will be striped in yellow and black.
The giant wood wasp can also be mistaken for a hornet (though only by people who have never seen hornets). It is a seriously big wasp, with a narrow yellow and black abdomen. It looks quite menacing, with what might appear to be a long sting protruding from the abdomen. These creatures are also called horntails. In fact the ‘sting’ is an ovipositor, a tube for placing the egg carefully into the wood of a usually diseased tree. The larva burrows into the wood and will live for perhaps two years in the larval state. The adult wasp is in fact quite harmless, having no sting at all.
Two other creatures may be mistaken for hornets, neither of which belongs to the wasp family at all. I remember seeing one on a visit to Lincoln, sunning itself on a stone in the cathedral yard. It was a hornet clearwing moth. This large moth quite brilliantly imitates a hornet: it has clear wings, hence the name (they are in fact brown bordered), and a bulky abdomen striped in just the same way. They are not particularly common in the UK, but can be found. Other clearwing moths, such as the more common currant clearwing, imitate smaller wasps; the hornet clearwing, however, actually manages to move like a hornet, too. This important protective adaptation sadly doesn’t work with human beings, who routinely kill this harmless insect. Hornet clearwings fly in high summer - July and August.
Finally, the broad-bodied chaser, a species of dragonfly, can also be mistaken for a hornet, as both male and female can have abdomens in quite a bright yellow when they are newly emerged (the male develops a blue body, and the female darkens). Their wings are obviously dragonfly-type, as is their flight, and though some people persist in believing that dragonflies can sting, they don’t.
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