Mexican honey wasp
The Mexican honey wasp is a small wasp with yellow and black stripes and a short, round belly. It is one of the very few wasps in the world that makes honey. Thousands of them live together in a big paper nest in a bush or tree.
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Fun facts
One nest can be home to between 3,500 and 18,700 wasps.
Its paper nest can be 40 to 50 centimetres wide and grows in a spiral, layer after layer, until it looks like a big sausage.
It helps farmers by eating pests and by pollinating avocado flowers.
In parts of Mexico its honey is eaten as a special treat.
A colony can have hundreds of queens at the same time.
Most asked questions about Mexican honey wasp
?Do wasps make honey?
Most do not, but the Mexican honey wasp does. It is one of the very few wasps that make honey.
?How big is a Mexican honey wasp?
It is small, only about 7 to 9 millimetres long.
For bug experts
- Scientific name
- Brachygastra mellifica
- Group
- Wasps and hornets
- Family
- Vespidae
- Classification
- Insecta > Hymenoptera > Vespidae
- Lives on
- North America
Where the facts come from
- Brachygastra mellifica (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
- Picture by Alex Wild/Insects Unlocked. CC0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.
If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at hello@bugwiki.app and we will fix it.
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