Stenogastrinae

The Stenogastrinae are a subfamily of social wasps included in the family Vespidae. They are sometimes called hover wasps owing to the particular hovering flight of some species. Their morphology and biology present interesting peculiarities.

==Systematic position== The first reports on stenogastrine wasps can be found in a book of Guérin de Méneville (1831) with the first known species, Stenogaster fulgipennis. Henri Louis Frédéric de Saussure treated their systematic position and remarked that these wasps were, in all their characters, entirely intermediate between the two subfamilies of Eumeninae and Vespinae. In 1927, Anton von Schulthess-Rechberg created the new genus Parischnogaster for some species living in the Oriental region.thumb|A colony of Parischnogaster (belonging to the jacobsoni group) Dutch entomologist Jacobus van der Vecht created four new genera including species from the entire area of distribution and described tens of new species. He revised the two Papuan genera Anischnogaster and Stenogaster and the oriental genus Metischnogaster while the largest genera of the Oriental region, Liostenogaster and Eustenogaster, still wait for revision. He also created one more genus, Holischnogaster, which has been then synonymised by Carpenter (1982) with Parischnogaster. A seventh genus, Cochlischnogaster, described by two Chinese entomologists (Dong and Otsuka), has been more recently included in the subfamily. Carpenter made overviews of the taxonomy and phylogeny of the group which he treated as a subfamily of the family Vespidae, and concluded that the Stenogastrinae, Polistinae, and Vespinae are sister groups and derive from a common ancestor (with no other living offspring). A more complete analysis, published 2010, from the same author including biomolecular data, confirmed this phylogeny. However, some other investigations (from 2007 and 2018) indicate that instead the Polistinae, Vespinae, Masarinae, and Eumeninae all are closer related to each others than to the Stenogastrinae.