Apoidea
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 Apis mellifera, the Western Honeybee
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The superfamily Apoidea is a major group within the Hymenoptera, as it includes the "sphecoid" wasps, in addition to their descendants, the bees. These two major lineages are too closely related to be cleanly split from one another, and even the present classification faces some serious challenges, as it appears that the sphecoid family Crabronidae is the group from which the bees arose. In effect, bees are simply a lineage of crabronid wasps that switched to the use of pollen and nectar as larval food, rather than insect prey. Accordingly, they are all grouped together now in a single superfamily, and the older available name is "Apoidea" rather than "Sphecoidea" (which has also been used in the past, but is obsolete, as it defined a paraphyletic group; note that Spheciformes is also). Nonetheless, as the bees are unequivocally a monophyletic group, it is still convenient to use a grouping of higher rank than family to unify all bees; a few recent classifications have addressed this problem by lumping all bee families together into a single large family Apidae, though this has not met with widespread acceptance. The various families of bees are, therefore, presently united under the name Anthophila, which is equivalent to the obsolete name Apiformes. Note, however, that this name has no taxonomic rank - it is neither a series nor superfamily, though for convenience's sake it is listed here as a series.
[edit] External Links
Solitary BeesPopular introduction to the Hymenoptera Apoidea.
[edit] References
- Engel, M.S. (2005). Family-group names for bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea). American Museum Novitates 3476: 1-33.
- Grimaldi, D. and Engel, M.S. (2005). Evolution of the Insects. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82149-5.
- Michener, C.D. (2000). The Bees of the World. Johns Hopkins University Press.
