This family consists of the honey bees, stingless bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees, cuckoo bees, bumblebees, and others. In all there are about 30,000 species, they all eat pollen and nectar and feed their larvae on the same diet.
The Braconidae are a very large family of parasitic wasps with between 50,000 and 150,000 species worldwide, and about 1000 UK species. Braconids are usually black-brown in colour although some species are brightly patterned.
The Chrysididae are a family wasps with bright metallic coloured bodies. As a result are commonly called jewel wasps, or ruby-tailed wasps. This is a large family consisting of over 3000 species of which there are some 31 species in the UK.
The Formicidae is a very large family of which contains the Ants. There are estimated to be 22,000 species of which 12,000 have been classified. All are social insects, living in colonies and having a female (queen), male, and worker castes.
Sawflies, bees, wasps, and ants are second only to Coleoptera in the number of species. There are in excess of 120,000 known species, of which more than 40,000 occur in Europe, and 6.500 in the UK.
The wasps of the Ichneumonidae family are solitary insects, and most are parasites - the larvae feeding on or in another insect. These wasps mainly target the larvae of butterflies and moths, although some species are also parasites of sawfly and beetle larvae.
