Behavior notes and prey spectrum of three species of the bee-hunting wasp Trachypus Klug (Hymenoptera: Apoidea)

Felipe Walter Pereira,Rodrigo Barbosa Gonçalves

doi:10.11606/1807-0205/2021.61.37

Felipe Walter Pereira, Rodrigo Barbosa Gonçalves

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.11606/1807-0205/2021.61.37

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Abstract

Trachypus Klug is a Neotropical genus of crabronid wasps comprising 31 ground-nesting species. Its species can be solitary or communal, and two diet ranges are known: they can forage on several bee subfamilies and wasps; or can be specialists on stingless bees. Natural history observations are scarce nowadays but are essential to contextualize ecological and evolutionary studies. Here we report new records and give biological notes for Trachypus elongatus (Fabricius, 1804), Trachypus taschenbergi Rubio-Espina, 1975, and Trachypus varius (Taschenberg, 1875). Observations and samplings were carried out twice a month, during one year in the city of Curitiba, southern Brazil. Besides field observations, circular statistics were used to analyze seasonality. All species nest in sloped soil and are solitary. Trachypus elongatus and T. taschenbergi were active during most of the year with marked seasonality in the late spring and early summer. Both species were observed hunting only stingless bees, with T. elongatus specialized on Trigona spinipes (Fabricius, 1793), and T. taschenbergi specialized on Paratrigona subnuda Moure, 1947 drones. Trachypus varius was observed only in January and one female was recorded foraging on a Paratrigona subnuda worker. Our observations provide additional data for understanding the biology of bee-hunting wasps, and this is the first study to bring information for T. taschenbergi and T. varius. Our data corroborate that some species of the genus Trachypus are specialized on stingless bees.

Highlights

Trachypus Klug, 1810 (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Crabronidae: Philanthinae) comprises ground-nesting wasps that hunt bees and more rarely other wasps (Evans & Matthews, 1973; Rubio-Espina, 1975; Polidori et al, 2009)
For both T. taschenbergi and T. elongatus we observed a weak preference for nesting on soil exposed to sunlight; both species we found on shadowed surfaces
We studied Trachypus elongatus, T. taschenbergi, and T. varius during one year, observing that nests are excavated in sloped soil by solitary females without communal behavior

Summary

Introduction

Trachypus Klug, 1810 (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Crabronidae: Philanthinae) comprises ground-nesting wasps that hunt bees and more rarely other wasps (Evans & Matthews, 1973; Rubio-Espina, 1975; Polidori et al, 2009). The genus was revised by Rubio-Espina (1975) and currently comprises 31 species restricted to the Neotropical Region (Amarante, 2006; Pulawski, 2019). Trachypus is a monophyletic group nested within the paraphyletic Philanthus Fabricius, 1790 as suggested by Alexander (1992) using morphology, and later by Kaltenpoth et al (2014) and Sann et al (2018) using molecular data. Natural history information is available in the literature for nine species: Trachypus bohar‐ The Philanthus paraphyly demands further genus descriptions to make natural the classification of its clade.

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