From left to right:
Ordinary Bee, Bumble Bee, Wasp, European Frelon, Asiatic Frelon
You will note that the Asiatic Frelon is mostly black and an orange band towards the tail-end… and yellow “feet”
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Also, the carpenter bee which is big and beautiful and we have loads here. Only the females can sting but they are normally very docile. I was recommended to leave a pile of wood at the bottom of the garden by a neighbour to attract them. Not to be kind to them but to stop them laying their grubs in our rafters.
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and extremely noisy… can sound like a cross between an HGV and a helicopter 
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Just for your edification, in the US, a wasp is a totally different creature and what you call a wasp ( in the middle) here would be a ‘yellow jacket’ in the US. My French hosts at dinner last week were amused by that moniker.
Or as I call them:
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What is it? Picture please.
Look at the solitary wasps
Thank you! I love how pretty the sweat bee is. So actually wasps are wasps it’s just that they have more specialised names. I thought we were going to be in a robin situation 
Pretty sure Arnold would sort it out.
I stepped on a wasp barefoot last week, and somehow didn’t get stung… Happened once with a bee, and that hurt for a while - thankfully I didn’t kill it… I’m more worried about these giant dark horseflies that seem to be on the rise during this hot weather. I’ve never been bitten by one, but having had several close encounters, I think they scare me more than hornets.
Sent 6 of them to their promised land this evening as they began to get aggressive around the pool.
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For those of us in France, perhaps best to forget any offered translations and stick with
Strange, the picture for a carpenter bee is nothing like ours here in France - huge, totally blue/black, deep buzz - bees on steroids. And completely benign 
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Seems there’s a whole range of 'em… named after how/where they nest (in old wood etc)
When we first came, we heard some Brits call the glorious black with blue wings “stone bees”.. no idea why, but in French it’s one of the family of Charpentière = Carpenter
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There’s a very dark variety of bee that we know as the masonry bee, which tunnels into the mortar of old houses. They can do quite a bit of damage, and necessitate regular repointing.
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We have those each year. They use and re-use a partiular part of the stone window. We watch them at work, spring-cleaning the “tunnel” then laying eggs and sealing up … finally waiting for the babies to emerge..
It’s fascinating and they don’t seem to attack anywhere else, thank heavens.
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Four evenings running, between 11pm and midnight, a hornet pottered up and down a metre wide stretch of the sitting room wall. Three nights l put it outside. The fourth night it seemed to flounder in an overwatered plant pot after getting entangled in a spider web behind a cupboard. Nothing on the fifth evening. Last night, on time, another appearance, and l put it outside. Five minutes later a smaller one appeared although l had closed every window/door. Might they be breeding under the couch? I can co-exist with them, but the downside is l have to let the dogs sleep in my bedroom, as l can’t trust them to control their curiosity. Any suggestions?
I’m amazed you managed to catch one. They just seemed to appear at night, fly frantically around the outside light for a minute or two and then leave. I share the anxiety around horse flies. The first time I saw a carpenter bee in France I took it be an enormous house fly.
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That’s the same as I posted, it’s just you need the light to reflect just right off the wings for them to look blue. Ours look all black as well most of the time. They are completely harmless and have a habit of bouncing off all surfaces seemingly unharmed.
I was referring back to @Nunthewiser 's list - which has this image alongside Carpenter bees.
(lovely photo)
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