Notes on oriental Vespinae, including some species from China and Japan (Hymenoptera, Vespidae)

Since the publication of my revision of the Vespinae of the Indo-Malayan and Papuan areas (1957), I have had the opportunity to study a considerable amount of additional material of this subfamily. Part of this material originated from the areas treated in my previous paper, and in so far as the following notes refer to these specimens, they may be regarded as a first supplement to that revision. The present paper, however, also contains some information on the Vespinae occurring in India, China, and Japan. At first I had hoped to round off my studies of the Vespinae by preparing a more or less complete revision of the Vespa species of the Asiatic continent, but so far it has proved impossible to accumulate sufficient material for this purpose. The males of some species are either very poorly represented in collections or entirely unknown, and the problem of the geographic variation of several species appears to be much more complicated in the continental fauna than in that of the insular areas. For these reasons I have incorporated in this paper my notes on various continental species and subspecies, hoping that they will contribute to the further study of this interesting group. These notes should be regarded as supplemental to the monograph of du Buysson (1904-05), or, in the case of Vespa affinis, tropica, and analis, to the studies of these species by Bequaert (1936, 1939); I have therefore not repeated the literature references which may be found in these papers. Here follows a list of the collections studied, together with the abbreviations used in the text. BM = British Museum (Natural History), London. — Only a small part of the Oriental Vespinae of this Museum could be examined.