I’ve been looking for a decent guide (physical or digital, doesn’t matter) for wasps and have come up dry so far. The only guides I have are for general insects, and thus don’t go into enough depth to be useful. There are a small handful of books that pop up in searches, but there’s no inside preview so I can’t judge how useful they are. Any recommendations?
Aside from just personal interest, I’m also asking because I’ve noticed wasps are common, yet seem to be suffering from a lack of IDers when compared to other common orders of insects.
Sadly I can not think of anything, if you limit your searches here to the areas in question your results are likely to be as good as anything out there.
@humanbyweight (aka Chris Kratzer) is publishing " **THE SOCIAL WASPS OF NORTH AMERICA a (field guide to all North American species of Vespinae & Polistinae). Hopefully in late 2021.
This should be a wonderful addition to the region’s entomological field guides!
This is from the Canadian Journal of Arthropod Identification, and covers most of the species in the northerneastern part of the US. It generally requires a specimen in hand, unfortunately. http://cjai.biologicalsurvey.ca/bmc_05/bmc_05.html
Perhaps of less interest for most posters here, but the Korean Forestry Service has a pdf titled “산림 말벌 바로 알기 / Social Wasps of the Forest” that’s helpful for South Korean species.
None of these are field guides and they’re technical, but wasps are a difficult area and they may be useful in narrowing down the possibilities. BugGuide is a great place to browse if you get family / genus names and these pubs might help with that. They’re all free so it’s easy to have a look and see if they could be helpful. My go-to field guide for insects, is the Kaufman Field Guide to Insects of North America by Eric Eaton and Kenn Kaufman. It covers all the groups, but it can get you started pretty quickly.
