We have lots of wasps here: mostly paper wasps (
polistes dominula, I think, with long trailing hind legs). A bit less elegant than
vespula germanica, they just go about their business and avoid us. There is a regular rotation of worker wasps to any source of water in the garden: they seem to need a lot of water (apparently this is to build the paper hive and cool it down when it gets hot in summer). I'd always wondered where the nest was, until the tilers doing a bit of maintenance on the living room roof last year found it under a tile. After much swearing and spraying, the nest was removed. The paper wasps are back this year, and we leave them alone. In 4 years of close proximity, never been stung or even attacked.
We occasionally get a few hornets (
vespa crabro), large things, also no problem. We don't see too many of the Asian hornets (
vespa velutina), which are an invasive species around here - we try to swat the isolated ones we see. There are lots of carpenter bees (
xylocopa violacea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylocopa_violacea#/media/File:European_violet_carpenter_bee.jpg) that are huge, very loud and very beautiful, with a slight mauve sheen to the body and iridescent wings. One of them developed an affection for the wall-mounted Gardena hose reel in the garden, which has screw holes just the right size for
xylocopa to nestle in. They can drill impeccable 8mm holes in the hardest wood, according to one grumpy neighbour who was upset with the way they had destroyed one of her windows, but we haven't seen any damage - they must be using her windows exclusively, or trees somewhere else.