Vespa soror du Buysson

Bass, Amber, Needham, Karen & Bennett, Andrew M. R., 2022, First record of Vespa crabro Linnaeus (Hymenoptera: Vespidae) in western North America with a review of recorded species of Vespa Linnaeus in Canada, Zootaxa 5154 (3), pp. 305-318 : 310-314

Vespa soror du Buysson

Fig. 5

The specimen collected at the Port of Vancouver in May 2019 ( Fig. 5 ) was initially identified morphologically as Vespa ducalis Smith (https://globalnews.ca/news/5326422/north-vancouver-mystery-hornet-identified) but subsequent examination changed the determination to Vespa soror du Buysson. We assembled a 523 bp sequence (GenBank Accession OL702715 ) that was 98.09% identical to a V. soror sequence from China on GenBank (Accession MZ191819 ), with an E-value of 0.0, and a bit score of 911. Including the British Columbia specimen, there are five V. soror sequences in the BOLD database (three from China and one with unknown provenance from Perrard et al. 2013) and they all cluster in the same BIN (ACQ0570) that has a maximum sequence divergence between specimens of 2.12%.

Material examined: CANADA: 1 ♀, BC, Port of Vancouver , 49°18’7.56”N, 123°6’ 34.92”W, 10.v.2019, T . Hergott , SEM-UBC HYM-14359 ( SEM) .

Distribution: Native to south and southeast Asia including India, southwestern China, Hong Kong, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam ( Archer 1995; Smith-Pardo et al. 2020), adventive in northwest Nearctic (Kozak 2020).

Diagnosis: Vespa soror can be distinguished from other Vespa species that have been recorded in Canada by having a combination of the following characters: 1) gena length at least 1.7× the length of eye ( Fig. 5B ), 2) metasomal tergum 1 length at least half of posterior width, and 3) terga 3–6 black ( Fig. 5B ), sometimes with a narrow posterior band of orange on tergite 3.

Figures

FIGURE 5. Vespa soror specimen collected at Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. A. Dorsal habitus. B. Lateral habitus. C. Anterior view of head. Vertical arrow in C shows the distance between posterior ocellus and posterior edge of vertex; horizontal arrow shows distance between posterior ocellus and eye. Scale bars: 1 mm.