How to refer to bee species as a group?

[Malcolm Fraser]

Hello - I'm writing a document and I need a catch-all term for bees - I can't work out whether I should use:

Apoidea superfamily

or

Apidae family - is this term in common usage and does it encompass all UK bee species?

thanks
Malcolm

[ChrisR]

Seems like neither really does the job (after a quick bit of WikiPedia-ing). Superfamily Apoidea contains the sphecid wasps ... while the family Apidae doesn't contain some other groups of bee. Whoever wrote the WikiPedia article suggests the unranked group "Anthophila" or "Apiformes" as a catch-all for bees. Let's wait for eucera though in case he has some better suggestions

Of course the word "bees" might be a better way of doing it

[eucera]

This is a bit of a taxonomic difficulty.

I think it depends on what one understands as a "Family". There are plenty who would put ALL bees into one family within the Apoidea and call it APIDAE. This would relegate all the traditional bee "families" to the rank of sub-families. ie AndreniDAE become sub family AndreniNAE

As long as what you do is clear to the reader then you will have no problem

[Malcolm Fraser]

thanks for the advice - I think I'll go for Apidae, and add a little qualification.

Malcolm