Salmoneus wrote: ↑11 Aug 2021 21:27Again:
you live in northern Europe. You don't have many types of wasp, so can mostly just assume that anything that isn't a prototypical wasp is a bee. This isn't true in the rest of the world. It's also not actually accurate even in Europe.
OK, but it's not just assuming that anything that isn't a "prototypical wasp" is a bee when there are clearly distinct A) wasps, B) bees and C) hornets. If it's unclear, then the assumption will still be mostly accurate based on which one it looks the most like... in Finland. Climate change might change that, too, so dunno if it will be in the future. If these distinctions aren't anywhere as clear in other countries, as clearly is the case, well, then it makes perfect sense that languages around the world wouldn't have the same terminology for these insects... so now, knowing this, I agree with your point that there's literally no way to tell and that there probably won't be different terms for them or the specific insects won't be grouped based on their scientific classification.
I mean, I already knew that at least Americans call all kinds of weird stingy insects "wasps" but honestly always just assumed they're not actually wasps in the scientific sense and that it's just a common name that's technically a misnomer and as such that it doesn't count, but I guess those probably are also all wasps then.
Salmoneus wrote: ↑11 Aug 2021 21:27you can see it's a bit hairy
Just in case you got our arguments mixed up since we posted at the same time, it was Elemtilas who mentioned hairiness as an indicator of wasp vs bee, not me, since in Finland wasps are just as hairy as bees. I did mention hair
colour, but clearly I was wrong about that as far as the rest of the world goes.
Creyeditor wrote: ↑11 Aug 2021 20:54Just wanted to mention that bumblebees (Hummeln) are not considered bees in German.
In Finnish they're called
kimalainen and it's its own term unrelated to the words for bees (
mehiläinen), wasps (
ampiainen) and hornets (
herhiläinen), but the common perception is that they're basically all the same except different. The words are just "pseudo-descriptive" terms like a lot of animal names in Finnish. Well, half of them are derived from loanwords from Indo-European languages, which again goes to show that Finns have never been able to name anything on our own.