As spring gives way to summer, you’re sure to notice wasps and hornets buzzing around you. But what you call those bugs matters, because a frightening nickname can lead people to misidentify insects.

There are about 17,000 known wasp species in North America, and probably thousands more that haven’t been named yet. It was so-called murder hornets, though — a wasp species native to Asia — that made news after they showed up in the Pacific Northwest in late 2019.

Michael Skvarla is an entomologist who directs the Insect Identification Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University. When he saw coverage of the murder hornet in 2020, particularly an article in The New York Times that was also syndicated by other publications, he braced for a storm.

“As soon as I read it, I thought, ‘Yep, this is going to be bad,’” Skvarla said.

It was highly unlikely that the invasive hornets would hop from the Pacific Northwest directly to the eastern United States. But Skvarla had a feeling that members of the public would suddenly panic about other large wasp species that already lived in this part of the country.

He was right: Skvarla’s lab and others like it were swarmed with requests to identify insects, many of which turned out to be common wasps and hornets. The experience, which he and colleagues described in the journal American Entomologist, highlighted how unfamiliar many people are with the bugs in their backyard.

Murder hornet, or Vespa mandarinia, workers are about 1.5 inches long. The queens, which can be more than 2 inches long, are some of the world’s largest wasps, but usually stay inside their nests. Of course, “murder hornet” is only a nickname. Scientists have worried that the large wasps, which hunt honeybees on their native continent, may spread across North America and harm bee species that already face habitat disturbance, lack of food and pesticide exposure.

Before the name “murder hornet” spread, the common name of V. mandarinia was traditionally the giant hornet or the Asian giant hornet. Last year, though, the Entomological Society of America introduced “northern giant hornet” as the insect’s new common name, in part to avoid driving anti-Asian sentiment.

Names matter. Before spring 2020, “we had never heard the name ‘murder hornet,’ nor had any entomologist we had spoken to,” Skvarla and two colleagues wrote.

Within two days of the publication of the Times article, Skvarla and Matthew Bertone, the director of the Plant Disease and Insect Clinic at North Carolina State University, started getting ID requests for large wasps. Soon, Skvarla was fielding 10 or 20 such requests every day.

“It felt like a deluge quite quickly,” he said.

Some people who sent in pictures or bodies of insects mentioned murder hornets by name, even expressing certainty about what they had found. “Not in PA? Think again. Murder hornet,” one client wrote. Others didn’t mention the invasive Asian wasps at all. But Skvarla and Bertone suspected that nervousness about V. mandarinia was making people more aware of the large wasps around them.

Two years later, Skvarla, Bertone and P.J. Liesch, director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, analyzed the data to see if their hunch was correct.

They found that both of the eastern universities had seen a huge increase in identification requests for large wasps that resemble murder hornets. For example, before 2020, the North Carolina State lab saw an average of two European hornets per year. In 2020, the lab received 215 European hornets. In the next year, there were another 217. The lab in Wisconsin, where European hornets don’t live, didn’t see the same jump in ID requests.

People who sent ID requests for large wasps often overestimated the insects’ size, Skvarla and his co-authors found. For example, southern yellowjacket workers are only about half an inch long, but clients described them as 1.3 inches long, on average. In a few cases, people overestimated a wasp’s size even though they had submitted a photo of it next to a tape measure.

“Everybody overestimates the size of things,” said Kevin Schermerhorn, an entomologist at the Insect Diagnostic Lab at Cornell University who wasn’t part of the study. Schermerhorn said that his lab also received an influx of ID requests for potential murder hornets in the spring and summer of 2020.

“We have not gotten any positives yet,” Schermerhorn said.

The nervousness wasn’t confined to murder hornet look-alikes.

Although most of the bugs that people mistook for murder hornets were really European hornets, cicada killers or southern yellowjackets, the researchers also got requests to identify insects that turned out to be flies, cicadas and beetles. One client even sent a picture of a wasp-shaped children’s toy.

“The person did mention that it wasn’t moving,” Liesch said.

The requests continued into 2022 before falling off in the past year, the scientists say, although 2023’s wasp season is just getting started.

Liesch attributed the difference in part to less talk about northern giant hornets in the news. The insects did not turn up in the Pacific Northwest last year, which means scientists, too, can feel a little less nervous.

Still, Liesch said, “It’s too early to tell for sure if they’re truly gone.”

Skvarla says his favorite identification requests come from people who are simply curious about what’s around them. “Not everybody is afraid of what they’re seeing,” he said.

Of the thousands of types of wasps out there, most aren’t the stinging kind. They’re species called parasitoids, which lay their eggs inside the bodies of other bugs but don’t usually bother humans.

And even if they are the kind that sting, as long as you stay away from their business ends, wasps are beneficial to people. They prey on other bugs that are pests in farms and gardens, and they pollinate flowers while they’re at it.

Still, Schermerhorn has a healthy respect for the native North American wasps. He recalled his first time seeing a cicada killer up close.

“Obviously I know more about bugs than the average person,” he said, “and I was still like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s not OK.’”

Here are some other wasps that have often been confused for the northern giant hornet.

Eastern Cicada Killer

Native to the eastern part of North America, this species is solitary, unlike the yellowjackets you might be more familiar with. A female cicada killer uses her stinger to paralyze cicadas. Then she drags them into an underground burrow and leaves them for her larvae to eat.

Southern Yellowjacket

This large wasp species is native to eastern parts of North America. Southern yellowjacket queens violently take over the nests of some other yellowjacket species by killing their queens.

European Hornet

This wasp species arrived in North America in the mid-1800s and has now spread throughout the eastern United States — exactly what scientists hope won’t happen with the invasive hornets from Asia. European hornet workers are about an inch long and build large paper nests inside tree hollows (or, sometimes, the walls of a house).