Polistes Latreille, 1802

Genaro, Julio A., 2011, Vespidae (Insecta: Hymenoptera) of Puerto Rico, West Indies, Insecta Mundi 2011 (202), pp. 1-35 : 17

Genus Polistes Latreille

There are more than 200 species in the genus, with more than 90 described from the New World. The three species recorded here are now placed in the subgenus Aphanilopterus Meunier in the broad sense ( Carpenter 1996). In the subgeneric classification of Richards (1978), P. major was placed in a different subgenus, Palisotius Richards , from the other two species, which were both included in the same species group, the crinitus group, or Group 5, of the subgenus Aphanilopterus in the restricted sense. In the cladistic analysis by Pickett and Wenzel (2004), P. major and P. crinitus americanus were sister�groups, with P. minor distantly related. More recent analyses have shown P. major and P. crinitus as not closely related ( Pickett et al. 2006; Pickett and Carpenter 2010), but P. minor was not included.