The

superfamily SUPERFAMILY is a database and search platform of structural and functional annotation for all proteins and genomes. It classifies amino acid sequences into known structural domains, especially into SCOP superfamilies. Domains are functional, str ...

Apoidea is a major group within the

Hymenoptera Hymenoptera is a large order of insects, comprising the sawflies, wasps, bees, and ants. Over 150,000 living species of Hymenoptera have been described, in addition to over 2,000 extinct ones. Many of the species are parasitic. Females typic ...

, which includes two traditionally recognized lineages, the " sphecoid"

wasp 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 ...

s, and the

bee Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the superfami ...

s. Molecular phylogeny demonstrates that the bees arose from within the traditional " Crabronidae", so that grouping is

paraphyletic In taxonomy, a group is paraphyletic if it consists of the group's last common ancestor and most of its descendants, excluding a few monophyletic subgroups. The group is said to be paraphyletic ''with respect to'' the excluded subgroups. In ...

, and this has led to a reclassification to produce monophyletic families.Manuela Sann, Oliver Niehuis, Ralph S. Peters, Christoph Mayer, Alexey Kozlov, Lars Podsiadlowski, Sarah Bank, Karen Meusemann, Bernhard Misof, Christoph Bleidorn and Michael Ohl (2018) Phylogenomic analysis of Apoidea sheds new light on the sister group of bees. ''BMC Evolutionary Biology'' 18:71. doi:10.1186/s12862-018-1155-8

Nomenclature

Bees appear in recent classifications to be a specialized lineage of " crabronid" wasps that switched to the use of

pollen Pollen is a powdery substance produced by seed plants. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm cells). Pollen grains have a hard coat made of sporopollenin that protects the gametop ...

and

nectar Nectar is a sugar-rich liquid produced by plants in glands called nectaries or nectarines, either within the flowers with which it attracts pollinating animals, or by extrafloral nectaries, which provide a nutrient source to animal mutualist ...

larva A larva (; plural larvae ) is a distinct juvenile form many animals undergo before metamorphosis into adults. Animals with indirect development such as insects, amphibians, or cnidarians typically have a larval phase of their life cycle. ...

l food, rather than

insect Insects (from Latin ') are pancrustacean hexapod invertebrates of the class Insecta. They are the largest group within the arthropod phylum. Insects have a chitinous exoskeleton, a three-part body ( head, thorax and abdomen), three pa ...

prey; this makes the traditional "Crabronidae" a

group. Accordingly, bees and sphecoids are now all grouped together in a single superfamily, and the older available name is "Apoidea" rather than " Sphecoidea" (which, like Spheciformes, has been used in the past, but also defined a

group and has been abandoned). As bees (not including their wasp ancestors) are still considered a

monophyletic In cladistics for a group of organisms, monophyly is the condition of being a clade—that is, a group of taxa composed only of a common ancestor (or more precisely an ancestral population) and all of its lineal descendants. Monophyletic gr ...

group, they are given a grouping between superfamily and family to unify all bees,

Anthophila Bees are winged insects closely related to wasps and ants, known for their roles in pollination and, in the case of the best-known bee species, the western honey bee, for producing honey. Bees are a monophyletic lineage within the super ...

. Engel, M.S. (2005)
Family-group names for bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea)
''American Museum Novitates'' 3476: 1–33.

Phylogeny

This

phylogenetic tree A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...

is based on Sann ''et al.'', 2018, which used

phylogenomics Phylogenomics is the intersection of the fields of evolution and genomics. The term has been used in multiple ways to refer to analysis that involves genome data and evolutionary reconstructions. It is a group of techniques within the larger fiel ...

to demonstrate that both the bees (

) and the

Sphecidae The Sphecidae are a cosmopolitan family of wasps of the suborder Apocrita that includes sand wasps, mud daubers, and other thread-waisted wasps. The name Sphecidae was formerly given to a much larger grouping of wasps. This was found to be ...

arose from within the former "Crabronidae," which is therefore

, and which they suggested should be split into several families; the former family Heterogynaidae nests within the Bembicidae, as defined by these authors. These findings differ in several details from studies published by two other sets of authors in 2017, though all three studies demonstrate a paraphyletic "Crabronidae."

References

External links

All Living Things
Images, identification guides, and maps of Apoidea.

Popular introduction to the Hymenoptera Apoidea.
Fiori e Api d'Albore and Intoppa
Flower visiting bees in Europe pdf. In Italian but excellent table with Latin names.
Native Bees of North America
{{Apidae-stub Apocrita superfamilies

Nomenclature

Phylogeny

References

Further reading

External links