Both flying insects, both yellow and black. Both have stingers.
But to a gardener they could not be more different.
The image on the left is a honey-bee. They are critical to the pollination of many plants, especially those that produce nuts and fruits. In a world without the honey-bee we'd still have food because grains and other plant-based food is often wind/self pollinated.
But we'd have less variety, growing food would be harder, and prices would be a lot more.
The image on the right is a yellow-legged hornet. They stress your gardens: they chew bark, damage fruit and - most importantly - hunt other pollinators. A garden without them is a healthier garden.
But the point is, if you don't know your insects, haven't researched how each impact the garden and have a "no flying insects" policy for your garden, your garden will grow more slowly, and garden by garden - you create a world where food is more expensive, and less bountiful.
Lumping bees and hornets under "flying insects" is like lumping bitcoin mining operations and AI data centres under "data centres": technically accurate, useless for policy, and dangerous for the grid.
Yet that is exactly what happened in Cedar Falls yesterday. The city council voted unanimously to block a Bitcoin mining facility from its 60% wind-powered industrial park - an operation that would have monetised surplus energy, and balanced the intermittency of that wind energy, without competing with a single resident for electricity.
Source: https://www.kwwl.com/news/no-crypto-mining-in-cedar-falls-after-unanimous-council-vote/article_50514eaf-7603-4c2b-9e9f-16b15bafdfd9.html
They banned the bee.
Because here is the nuance most people miss: the gardener who sprays pesticide on all flying insects does not get a pest-free garden. They get an unpollinated one. The fruit costs more. The garden grows more slowly. And the pests still find a way in.
That's what Cedar Falls just did.
A grid with flexible load has a shock absorber. When demand spikes, the miner steps aside in less than a second, freeing capacity without anyone building a new power plant.
A grid without Bitcoin Mining has no buffer. No surplus buyer. No way to balance supply and demand in real time without firing up gas peaker plants that cost more and sit idle most of the year.
The gardener who knows the difference between the bee and the hornet has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient garden.
The grid operator who knows the difference between Bitcoin mining and AI datacenters has a healthier, more balanced, more resilient grid.
The word 'data centre' is doing the same work as 'flying insect.' It collapses two fundamentally different things into one category so that people can avoid understanding the difference. The resilience of the grid suffers - and consumers get higher prices.
