British Insects: the Families of Hymenoptera
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British Insects: the Families of Hymenoptera |
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This data set is generated from a DELTA database (Dallwitz 1980; Dallwitz, Paine, and Zurcher 1993). The original intention of the ‘British Entomology’ suite of packages, of which it forms part, was primarily to present scans of the fine hand-coloured engravings of insects in John Curtis’s British Insects: illustrations and descriptions of the genera of insects found in Great Britain and Ireland (1824–1840), of which the first 12 volumes (up to 1835) are available to us. For further information on this aspect, see Notes on John Curtis’s British Entomology.
In addition to presenting Curtis’s and other early illustrations, all the ‘British Entomology’ subsets incorporate descriptive data organized under the DELTA system, and purport to offer at least partial identification and information retrieval via the interactive program Intkey. The present subset incorporates all the families of British Hymenoptera, described via standard morphological and ecological characters. It is unlikely to achieve its identificatory objective satisfactorily at this early stage of development, but in any case the DELTA data (from which updates of the interactive package are easily generated) are readily accessible for improving, correcting and extending.
Family descriptions were compiled for this purpose from Wright’s (1990) and Wilmer’s (1993) keys to the genera of Symphyta and Aculeata; then checked, improved and extended using the detailed taxonomic descriptions of Riek et al. (1970). To cover inaccessibility of the final two volumes of Curtis, and to extend considerably the coverage of families and genera illustrated, we have resorted to scans from Saunders’s (1896) and Cameron’s (1883, 1885) treatments of Hymenoptera Aculeata and Sawflies, respectively. Thus, we are able to exemplify most of the British families of Hymenoptera with at least one picture, and most with several to many.
The nomenclature of Curtis, Cameron and Saunders was aligned in the first instance with the original Check-list of Kloet and Hincks (1945), after which many of the rather numerous names not listed by them were tracked down with resort to the Second Edition, ‘completely revised’ by Fitton et al. (1978). The original edition of Kloet and Hincks remains indispensable, because the authors of the Second Edition chose to omit ‘some synonymy pertaining to the older British literature’. While they mention this qualification only in relation to the Aculeata, numerous generic and specific names of Symphyta employed by Cameron in the late Nineteenth Century are also missing from their list. A few of the omissions will represent insects no longer considered ‘British’, but this explanation cannot be generally applicable (for example, the Sawfly ‘Nematus ruficapillus’, said by Cameron to be ‘the commonest species of the group’). Names employed by Curtis but not located in modern Checklists are indicated by quotation marks in the Intkey displays of descriptions and images, and the plates involved are presented under the pseudo-taxon ‘Unidentified Images’. Saunders and Cameron illustrations posing this problem have been omitted.
Family assignments of the insects illustrated have been checked at family level, in effect with reference to the family descriptions in the cited works, by ‘identifying’ the illustrations using the Intkey package. While we think they conform reasonably well with the family assignments, however, checking on the generic and specific identities of the insects depicted has so far been very limited. Biologists wishing to use the pictures for their own purposes should therefore take the necessary precautions for themselves.