The ovipositor is a tube-like organ used by some animals, especially insects, for the laying of eggs. In insects, an ovipositor consists of a maximum of three pairs of appendages. The details and morphology of the ovipositor vary, but typically its form is adapted to functions such as preparing a place for the egg, transmitting the egg, and then placing it properly. For most insects, the organ is used merely to attach the egg to some surface, but for many parasitic species, it is a piercing organ as well.
In the United States, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) is a sociological term which is often used to describe white Protestant Americans of Northwestern European descent, who are generally part of the white dominant culture or upper-class and historically often the Mainline Protestant elite. Historically or most consistently, WASPs are of British descent, though the definition of WASP varies in this respect. WASPs have dominated American society, culture, and politics for most of the history of the United States. Critics have disparaged them as "The Establishment". Although the social influence of wealthy WASPs has declined since the 1960s, the group continues to play a central role in American finance, politics, and philanthropy.
The superfamily Apoidea is a major group within the Hymenoptera, which includes two traditionally recognized lineages, the "sphecoid" wasps, and the bees. Molecular phylogeny demonstrates that the bees arose from within the traditional "Crabronidae", so that grouping is paraphyletic, and this has led to a reclassification to produce monophyletic families.
The Vespidae are a large, diverse, cosmopolitan family of wasps, including nearly all the known eusocial wasps and many solitary wasps. Each social wasp colony includes a queen and a number of female workers with varying degrees of sterility relative to the queen. In temperate social species, colonies usually last only one year, dying at the onset of winter. New queens and males (drones) are produced towards the end of the summer, and after mating, the queens hibernate over winter in cracks or other sheltered locations. The nests of most species are constructed out of mud, but polistines and vespines use plant fibers, chewed to form a sort of paper. Many species are pollen vectors contributing to the pollination of several plants, being potential or even effective pollinators, while others are notable predators of pest insect species, and a few species are invasive pests.
Paper wasps are a type of vespid wasps. The term is typically used to refer to members of the vespid subfamily Polistinae, though it often colloquially includes members of the subfamilies Vespinae and Stenogastrinae, which also make nests out of paper.
Apocrita is a suborder of insects in the order Hymenoptera. It includes wasps, bees, and ants, and consists of many families. It contains the most advanced hymenopterans and is distinguished from Symphyta by the narrow "waist" (petiole) formed between the first two segments of the actual abdomen; the first abdominal segment is fused to the thorax, and is called the propodeum. Therefore, it is general practice, when discussing the body of an apocritan in a technical sense, to refer to the mesosoma and metasoma rather than the "thorax" and "abdomen", respectively. The evolution of a constricted waist was an important adaption for the parasitoid lifestyle of the ancestral apocritan, allowing more maneuverability of the female's ovipositor. The ovipositor either extends freely or is retracted, and may be developed into a stinger for both defense and paralyzing prey. Larvae are legless and blind, and either feed inside a host or in a nest cell provisioned by their mothers.
The Ichneumonidae, also known as ichneumon wasps, ichneumonid wasps, ichneumonids, or Darwin wasps, are a family of parasitoid wasps of the insect order Hymenoptera. They are one of the most diverse groups within the Hymenoptera with roughly 25,000 species described as of 2016. However, this likely represents less than a quarter of their true richness as reliable estimates are lacking, along with much of the most basic knowledge about their ecology, distribution, and evolution. It is estimated that there are more species in this family than there are species of birds and mammals combined. Ichneumonid wasps, with very few exceptions, attack the immature stages of holometabolous insects and spiders, eventually killing their hosts. They thus fulfill an important role as regulators of insect populations, both in natural and semi-natural systems, making them promising agents for biological control.
Wasps in the family Pompilidae are commonly called spider wasps, spider-hunting wasps, or pompilid wasps. The family is cosmopolitan, with some 5,000 species in six subfamilies. Nearly all species are solitary, and most capture and paralyze prey, though members of the subfamily Ceropalinae are kleptoparasites of other pompilids, or ectoparasitoids of living spiders.
The Sphecidae are a cosmopolitan family of wasps of the suborder Apocrita that includes sand wasps, mud daubers, and other thread-waisted wasps.
Potter wasps, the Eumeninae, are a cosmopolitan wasp group presently treated as a subfamily of Vespidae, but sometimes recognized in the past as a separate family, Eumenidae.
Parasitoid wasps are a large group of hymenopteran superfamilies, with all but the wood wasps (Orussoidea) being in the wasp-waisted Apocrita. As parasitoids, they lay their eggs on or in the bodies of other arthropods, sooner or later causing the death of these hosts. Different species specialise in hosts from different insect orders, most often Lepidoptera, though some select beetles, flies, or bugs; the spider wasps (Pompilidae) exclusively attack spiders.
Commonly known as cuckoo wasps or emerald wasps, the hymenopteran family Chrysididae is a very large cosmopolitan group of parasitoid or kleptoparasitic wasps, often highly sculptured, with brilliant metallic colors created by structural coloration. They are most diverse in desert regions of the world, as they are typically associated with solitary bee and wasp species, which are also most diverse in such areas. Their brood parasitic lifestyle has led to the evolution of fascinating adaptations, including chemical mimicry of host odors by some species.
A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. The wasps do not constitute a clade, a complete natural group with a single ancestor, as bees and ants are deeply nested within the wasps, having evolved from wasp ancestors. Wasps that are members of the clade Aculeata can sting their prey.
Icaria is a genus of eusocial paper wasps in the Ropalidiini tribe, which was later synonymized to Ropalidia Guérin-Méneville. The former genus contained, among other, the following species:
Belonogaster petiolata is a species of primitively eusocial wasp that dwells in southern Africa, in temperate or subhumid climate zones. This wasp species has a strong presence in South Africa and has also been seen in northern Johannesburg. Many colonies can be found in caves. The Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa, for example, contain large populations of B. petiolata.
Ropalidia revolutionalis, the stick-nest brown paper wasp, is a diurnal social wasp of the family Vespidae. They are known for the distinctive combs they make for their nests, and they have been found in Queensland, Australia in the areas of Brisbane and Townsville. They are an independent founding wasp species, and they build new nests each spring. They can be helpful because they control insect pests in gardens.
The African swarm-founding wasp, Polybioides tabidus, is a social paper wasp from the order Hymenoptera that is typically found in Central Africa. This wasp is unique in that it exhibits cyclical oligogyny, meaning queen number varies with colony cycle. After several generations of production of workers and future queens, a subset of many workers and queens leave the original colony to begin a new one. The new colony does not produce new queens until current queens from the old colony have died. P. tabidus has been observed to display both predator and scavenger behavior, depending on the food sources available.
Polybioides raphigastra is a species of social wasp found in the forests of South East Asia and Indonesia. It has recently been placed in the tribe Ropalidiini. This species is known for the downward-spiraling shape of their nests, and for having colony sizes exceeding ten thousand members.
Polybioides is a genus of paper wasp of the sub-family Polistinae which contains six species which are found in the Neotropical, Afrotropical and Indomalayan zoogeographic regions.
Ropalidia ornaticeps is an Asian species of paper wasp in the tribe Ropalidiini; no subspecies are listed in the Catalogue of Life. The recorded distribution for this species includes India through to Indochina, including Vietnam; the type specimens are females, taken from the Khasia Hills and deposited in Oxford and London.
