This is the nasty little bee that I have been trying to identify. As you can see it looks like a miniature Yellow Jacket. That seems to be ware the similarity ends however. Yellow Jackets can sting you a lot of times because they keep their stingers. They also go wild for mountain dew and you can just about clean a whole nest out with a 2 liter bottle with just enough mountain dew in the bottle to drown the bees.
This little bee is different in that it loses its' stinger when it stings and the mountain dew traps don't attract them at all. They do like what comes out of the rear end of the dogs however, and the garbage cans if they smell bad enough. I have also seen them all over some poor leftover that the cat killed. So I guess that you would have to say these bees are scavengers and meat lovers rather than necture lovers.
Yellow Jackets are scavengers themselves as anyone who has ever gone to a park and tried to throw away the picinic garbage can tell you but they will never pass up something sweet even if it kills them.
The normal Yellow Jacket is 5/8 inch to 1 inch long. As you can see from the picture these guys are real lucky if they can make it to 3/8 inch long and that may be pushing it since that's a dime that it's next to and they are 1/2 inch accross.
The Cincinnati Zoo gave me a couple of phone numbers to call to try and identify these little monsters and I struck out totally. The only answer I got from them was they have no idea what kind of bee that it was but if it caused that kind of reaction in a dog you sure don't want a child getting stung by one.
DUH NO KIDDING YOU THINK!!!
Personally I almost dropped the phone when the Phd of Entomology made that statement to me.
But he did give me some other choices that I am researching now. They were call local exterminators to see if they have run into them and maybe identified them.
That proved to be pointless because all they said was they could come out and kill them but there would be a hazard fee because of the sting risk. I told them thanks but no thanks I can kill them that's not the point.
The other is more disturbing and I have not downloaded it yet it is a university conference site for identifying the mutations that are occurring in the bees here in the US.
I will write more when I have more information and maybe an answer or two but for now if you see a bee that looks like a baby yellow jacket give it a very wide berth.
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