Cleptes Latreille, 1802

Paukkunen, Juho, Berg, Alexander, Soon, Villu, Odegaard, Frode & Rosa, Paolo, 2015, An illustrated key to the cuckoo wasps (Hymenoptera, Chrysididae) of the Nordic and Baltic countries, with description of a new species, ZooKeys 548, pp. 1-116 : 8

Taxon classification Animalia Hymenoptera Chrysididae

Genus Cleptes Latreille, 1802 Figs 11, 12-17

Cleptes Latreille, 1802: 316.

Note.

Cleptes females search for tenthredinid and diprionid sawfly cocoons either on the host’s foodplant or on the ground beneath and lay one egg per cocoon ( Morgan 1984). The emerging larva develops as an ectoparasitoid of the sawfly prepupa within the cocoon ( Darling and Smith 1985, Kimsey and Bohart 1991). The genus consists of around 100 known species, the majority of which occur in the Holarctic Region ( Kimsey and Bohart 1991, Wei et al. 2013, Arens 2014). A total of 27 species are known from Europe ( Rosa and Soon 2012, Arens 2014) and three from the Nordic and Baltic countries ( Paukkunen et al. 2014). We have divided the genus into species-groups according to Móczár (1997, 2001).

Key to Cleptes species of the Nordic and Baltic countries