this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2026
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Yup! Was about to type out a similar reply. To further clarify:
Hymenoptera - order of Insecta - ants, bees, wasps, hornets
Aculeata - infraorder of Hymenoptera - bees, wasps, hornets
Apidae - family of Aculeata - bees (also bumblebees)
Vespidae - family of Aculeata - wasps, hornets Formicidae - family of Hymenoptera - ants
edit20260227: forgot ants belong to aculeata
Except many non-Vespidae, both living and extinct, would readily be considered wasps. Look at this thing and tell me it’s not a wasp: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eusapvertic.jpg If that’s a wasp and a yellow-jacket is a wasp, then so are ants and bees, in the same way that we are apes and birds are dinosaurs. You wouldn’t call a zoo to deal with a loose human and you wouldn’t call dr. Grant to deal with a pigeon, but biologically it makes a lot more sense to deal with ancestry then with how a species interacts with humans.
You can't argue "this looks like a wasp so it is a wasp" and then extend from that to "and because of evolutionary history, all these other things that don't look like wasps are also wasps"
Defining groups of species with a common word is always going to be ambiguous, but you need to stay consistent in what you use to define it. By the same logic you can argue that humans are fish, because whales clearly are fish if you just look at them, and whales and humans are both mammals.
That logic doesn't check out, given Sapygidae is a family of sapygid wasps belonging to the Aculeata infraorder.
Aculeata is named after its defining feature, which is the modification of the ovipositor into a stinger. This trait doesn't strictly constitute a wasp, which is why they have their own families (Vespidae, Sapygidae, Pompilidae, Myrmosidae, basically all of the Chrysidoidea superfamily, etc.).
All wasps are aculeate, but not all aculeates are wasps.