Apoidea | |
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Apis mellifera, the western honeybee | |
Scientific classification
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Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Arthropoda |
Class: | Insecta |
Order: | Hymenoptera |
Suborder: | Apocrita |
Superfamily: |
Apoidea Latreille, 1802 |
Subgroups | |
Incertae sedis |
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. [1]
Bees appear in recent classifications to be a specialized lineage of " crabronid" wasps that switched to the use of pollen and nectar as larval food, rather than insect prey; this makes the traditional "Crabronidae" a paraphyletic 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 paraphyletic group and has been abandoned).
As bees (not including their wasp ancestors) are still considered a monophyletic group, they are given a grouping between superfamily and family to unify all bees, Anthophila. [2]
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This phylogenetic tree is based on Sann et al., 2018, which used phylogenomics to demonstrate that both the bees ( Anthophila) and the Sphecidae arose from within the former "Crabronidae," which is therefore paraphyletic, and which they suggested should be split into several families; the former family Heterogynaidae nests within the Bembicidae, as defined by these authors. [1] 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." [4] [5]
Apoidea |
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