Morphological variation between queens, workers and drones of Vespa orientalis L. (Hymenoptera: Vespidae: Vespinae)

Large-sized wasp, Vespa orientalis L., is a dangerous and widespread enemy to bee hives in Egypt and other countries of the world. There are eleven synonyms known as subspecies, colour forms or so called aberrations of Vespa orientalis , four of them are described from Egypt. Inadequate investigations have been used to identified these colour forms, especially depending upon colour features, without accreditation on other certainty characters such as male genitalia. Morphological with morphometric traits can help in verifying and distinguishing between the subspecies or other forms within individual species. In our study, some body structures of V . orientalis early queens, workers and drones from Egypt were measured including head length and width, mandibles length and width, antennal length, forewing length and width, hindwing length and width, number of hamuli, hind femora length, hind tibiae length and stinger. The result showed that the mean values were; queen head length 6.45 ± 0.03 and 4.54 ± 0.03 for drones, queen head width 6.97 ± 0.03, and 5.08 ± 0.04 for drones, antennal length is longer for drones 10.87 ± 0.07, slightly shorter for queens 10.08 ± 0.08, and distinctly shorter for workers 8.54 ± 0.05, forewing length 24.21 ± 0.12 for queens, and 19.89 ± 0.16 for workers, hindwing length is 14.20 ± 0.19 for queens, and 12.32 ± 0.09 for workers and drones. Some of these characters are effective to discriminating the individual species and can be utilized to emphasized the identification the original species of Vespa orientalis L.