The males are completely harmless although many have the ability to bluff their way out of a difficult situation, such as the beak of a bird. The aculeate collector, as with many avarian predators, might not be able to distinguish male from female wasp or bee in the field, and so an essential item of equipment is a butterfly net. Unfortunately, when it comes to identification work, a microscope is essential to examine pinned specimens. The stereoscopic kind with a magnification of 10 to about 40 or 50 will be most useful and only rarely will greater magnification be necessary. Ants are usually mounted on card points rather than being pinned.
Some mutillid wasps have a painful sting even though they look like relatively innocuous ants.
It is as well to be cautious when collecting aculeates in general. Although a sting is painful, it will not usually cause prolonged problems in most people. However, a small proportion of people undergo an allergic reaction called anaphylactic shock when stung, which is potentially fatal. Some with allergies like this may have a severe reaction to, for example, a honeybee sting but have no unusual symptoms with the sting of a bumblebee or wasp. Finally, increases in a parasitic mite and two species of predaceous wasps have resulted in the decline of the honeybee in this country.