| Spheciformes | |
|---|---|
| |
| Ampulex compressa | |
Scientific classification 
| |
| Domain: | Eukaryota |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Arthropoda |
| Class: | Insecta |
| Order: | Hymenoptera |
| Superfamily: | Apoidea |
| (unranked): | Spheciformes |
| Families[1] | |
The Spheciformes is a paraphyletic assemblage of insect families which collectively comprise the "sphecoid wasps". Larvae are carnivorous.
These are all the members of the superfamily Apoidea which are not bees and which in older classifications were called the "Sphecoidea". Some are also described as mud daubers.
The group is paraphyletic because bees are believed to have arisen from a subgroup within the family Ammoplanidae, thus Spheciformes does not include all of the descendants of its common ancestor.[2]
- ^ "Spheciformes". NCBI taxonomy. Bethesda, MD: National Center for Biotechnology Information. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
- ^ 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