The social wasps of Vietnam
Nguyen Thi Phuong Lien
Hymenopteran family Vespidae, with more than 5,000 species worldwide, is divided into six monophyletic subfamilies (Pickett and Carpenter, 2010). Four of the six vespid subfamilies are distributed in the Oriental region including Vietnam. They are the solitary wasp subfamily Eumeninae (potter wasps), the largest subfamily in the Vespidae, and the three social wasp subfamilies, that is, Stenogastrinae (hover wasps), Polistinae (paper wasps), and Vespinae (hornets and yellow-jackets). There are about 1,100 social wasp species in the world fauna and the highest number of species is recorded in Neotropics. Social wasps play important roles in ecosystem: they are beneficial in agriculture and forestry and can be used as biological pest control agents, and potentially useful for bio-monitoring of change in environments as they are very susceptible to pesticides and rapid environmental changes, and more than that, they are important model organisms for the study of the evolution of social behaviour.