I really enjoy observing my local bees and wasps. I don’t currently know enough about them to be confident IDing anything outside of a handful of very obvious species, but I’d really like to learn more - the problem is that I don’t know enough to know what kinds of resources I ought to look for.
I’m in eastern Canada (Ontario, more specifically) and in another thread here I found a link to these https://cjai.biologicalsurvey.ca/bmc_05/keys.html , and they look very thorough, but there’s a lot of what I think are specific anatomical terms in there that are going over my head.
Does anyone here have any good open resources for learning those anatomical terms? Or any other keys or diagrams that would be helpful for a beginner to learn what to look at to narrow down hymenoptera in northeastern north america? Any help at all is appreciated!
Are you interested in all of hymenoptera or specific families?
There is an introductory textbook or two that cover all hymenoptera, including some material you might be able to find online (e.g. Goulet and Huber, World key to families). However, these can be rather intimidating and I have found that the main broad groups (sawflies – ichneumonids and braconids – chalcids – predatory wasps and bees) are reasonably intuitive to learn to recognize even without much formal learning.
The Royal Entomological Society (UK) has a series of Handbooks for the Identification of British Insects, including multiple volumes on hymenoptera, including a key to families which should be relevant for North America. The older volumes in this series can all be downloaded for free. They are, however, fairly technical and not really aimed at a beginner.
It appears that Nastasi et al: Biodiversity & Classification of Wasps has been made available by the author on ResearchGate. This may be a more approachable introduction to hymenopteran anatomy.
If you are willing to purchase physical volumes, there are a couple of very beautiful, heavily illustrated recent publications that include a broad breakdown of the different hymenopteran families, though the focus is on biology and they don’t include formal keys:
Eric Eaton: Wasps: The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Insect
Simon van Noort / Gavin Broad: Wasps of the World: A Guide to Every Family (there is also another book in this series focusing just on bees)
and somewhat pricey and heavy, but fantastic:
Stephen Marshall: Hymenoptera: The Natural History and Diversity of Wasps, Bees, and Ants
Probably two most important things to become comfortable with for broad classification of hymenoptera are wing venation and antennal segments. Unfortunately not all scientists use the same conventions for naming anatomy, so you may have to become conversant with more than one set of terms; however, this does mean that most references will usually include a labeled diagram in the introduction.
Some general rules of thumb:
no waist → Symphyta
way too many antennal segments (20+) → Ichneumonoidea
really bizarre looking with reduced wing venation → Proctotrupomorpha (usually)
looks like a generic “wasp” or “bee” → Aculeata (or a bee mimic in some other insect order)
actively collecting pollen on legs or underside of abdomen → female bee
carrying prey → female Aculeata (usually Crabronidae, Sphecidae, or Pompilidae)
Oh wow, this rabbit hole is starting to look pretty deep. I’m taking a look through Biodiversity & Classification of Wasps now and I’m kind of intimidated! But thank you so much for all the ideas of places to look, and for those broad rules of thumb too.
To be honest I don’t know enough about the families under Hymenoptera to know everything I’m interested in - right now I’m just curious what exactly I’ve been seeing in my backyard and on hikes, so I have to figure out what families all those are in before I have a specific answer to the question. There are some very pretty sweat bees and bumblebees and paper wasps around, so I think that puts Halictidae, Apidae, and Vespidae on the list?
Coming from very casual birding, and enthusiasm for but no specific knowledge of herps and arthropods, I feel very out of my depth haha.
That first one is an interesting read. I don’t think I’ve managed to photograph wing venation closely enough to make the best use of the key in it, but informative nevertheless.
There’s so much new terminology to get used to when you’re used to vertebrates, so that reference is very welcome too. Thank you!
Unfortunately wing venation is pretty much the foundation of bee identification. It won’t get you to species, but it will get you to genus most of the time (for a few groups you need other traits as well, but usually wing venation will get you most of the way). Looking at the method of pollen transport is also really helpful for females (the main configurations are: pollen in a wet blob on the outside of the leg; pollen in a diffuse mass along the entire length of the leg; pollen on underside of abdomen).
For what it’s worth, I learned bee identification on iNat largely using this method, so while it is tricky to apply to photos, it is doable. After a while you start to recognize the genus or species by gestalt, but I found it helpful to orient myself using formal morphological criteria while starting out. Our mammalian brains try to focus on things like color patterns, which can lead us badly astray, as there are often species in different genera or even different families that have very similar color patterns. So the first step is retraining our brains to see differently and notice the relevant features.
There are some genera that can be recognized more-or-less intuitively – e.g. Bombus – but I still recommend familiarizing oneself with the standard traits, as bees provide regular opportunities for confusion (among other things: faded, wet, and bald individuals are difficult to make sense of without looking at morphology).
I might be out of luck for the smaller bees/wasps in my area, then, if only because my camera might not be up to the task of capturing that much detail. I do have a DSLR and macro lens, but older and entry level, and there’s only so much they can do for the really tiny sweat bees or really fast spider wasps, especially when I’m trying not to annoy my subjects. Drat.
I figured colour/pattern would be a red herring for a lot of them though, just from the sheer abundance of black and yellow stripes across so many species. So I’ll keep trying to focus on form and structure, to as close a level of detail as I have. And behaviour where relevant I suppose.
Even with lots of skill taking macro photos and a reasonably cooperative subject, it is often going to be very challenging to get field photos of small hymenopterans that are identifiable to species. Some genera are quite challenging even for experienced specialists looking at specimens under a microscope.
What this also means is that most specialists – and most keys – are accustomed to identification from specimens, which does not necessarily translate to identification from field photos. Most identifiers on iNat have had to figure out their own strategies for this sort of identification.
I’m not saying this to be discouraging, but rather so you have some idea what you are getting into and aren’t frustrated and disappointed if you discover there is a fairly long learning curve. I think it is worth it, but one shouldn’t have any illusions that one will master bees or wasps in a few weeks.
It can be useful to get to know your local identifiers and get a sense of who is open to providing pointers and is willing to be patient with beginner mistakes, as some busy IDers don’t always feel they have time for this. I don’t ID in North America so I can’t make any suggestions either for more specific resources or who might be open to mentoring. (I’m in Europe and we desperately need more hymenoptera IDers; I imagine it is the same in most parts of the world.)
For getting photos, it can be helpful to capture and chill the specimen (e.g. in your fridge) so they are less active. I would advise checking local laws before doing this, however – in some places you should ideally have a permit even for capture-and-release.
I feel like I can generally tell ants, bees, vespids, and ichneumonoids by gestalt and other groups are uncommon enough that I don’t mind not knowing them. Having more confidence on those groups and others as well as knowing some useful patterns within those groups would be nice though.
I also found this paper describing some online keys, the keys are here but the first question is about wing venation and I strongly feel that early questions in a key should be on broader gestalt questions when being applied to field/photo contexts. HymenoKeys: key to superfamilies
This website has illustrations and descriptions that seem handy for initial gestalt identifications but the site design makes me think it might be outdated: File: <families of hymenoptera
The Hymenoptera of the World is a good resource to have. It was a resource book for the Wasp ID Course. All 680 pages can be downloaded with no paywall or membership wall from the The Entomological Society of Canada/La Société d’entomologie du Canada (ESC/SEC) here: https://esc-sec.ca/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/AAFC_hymenoptera_of_the_world.pdf
One tip is the closer in you crop your image, the more we can see. Even if the image is high resolution on you phone or camera, iNat limits the greatest dimension to 2048. So if your EXIF says that you uploaded at 6000 pixel height, all we can see is 2048. Our resolution is a fraction of what you can see in the native image on your device of choice. I usually crop to fill most of the screen with the subject. Details help. Side profile, front face, rear view, and top view combined are helpful. Some more charismatic bees have a certain give/gestalt that if seen in an image is all that is needed. Others need a sum of views to complete the whole picture. Help us help you.
Oh no, only 2048px? I hadn’t realized iNat was sizing them down so much, though with hindsight that makes a lot of sense given how much image data they’ve got to store. And here I was trying to count antenna segments on photos that are 1/3 the size of my originals…
Glad for the tips about what parts of the animal to try and capture, though. Thank you.
This thread has so much useful advice; thank you everyone!
I will definitely be changing my approach to capture more wing detail. Is there anything else you wish non-experts knew about what identifiers need in a photo of hymenoptera?
Take as many photos as possible from as many different angles as possible.
That’s maybe not particularly helpful, but one of the things that makes hymenopterans tricky to identify from photos is that there isn’t one standard perspective that will usually allow you to determine the species. In general it’s good to aim for a photo from the top and a photo from the side (this advice applies to most other insects also), but beyond that the relevant features are pretty unpredictable and may be just about any body part. Many keys rely on the area between the wings or where the thorax meets the abdomen (scutellum/propodeum), which is usually not feasible to photograph in a freely flying specimen. Males of many groups are traditionally identified based on genital extraction.
Many of these things will apply to wasps in general, though I find bees are often somewhat easier to find and photograph than other hymenopterans (with the exception perhaps of ants) because of their flower visitation habits – though this depends a lot on the species. For other wasps, watching them and figuring out their habits can help you find an opportunity to get photos when they aren’t zooming around (I haven’t found a good strategy for pompilids or mutillids, as they rarely seem to stop moving).
Thank you for the thorough tips! Make wings and profile priority, after that just as many distinct angles as possible, and prepare for the possibility that the best you might get in the field is the genus.
I wonder if the strategy for pompilids is to try to follow them with a zoom lens rather than a macro. The ones I’ve seen are hard to get close to for any longer than a second or two, haha.
