Spheciformes

Not to be confused with Sphecidae.

The Spheciformes is a paraphyletic assemblage of insect families which collectively comprise the "sphecoid wasps", and includes about 10 000 species. Larvae are carnivorous.

Spheciformes
Ampulex compressa
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Hymenoptera
Superfamily:	Apoidea
(unranked):	Spheciformes
Families[1]
Ampulicidae Crabronidae Heterogynaidae Sphecidae

Spheciformes includes 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]

References

1. "Spheciformes". NCBI taxonomy. Bethesda, MD: National Center for Biotechnology Information. Retrieved 22 January 2019.
2. 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. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12862-018-1155-8