The species belonging to Sclerodermus (Hymenoptera: Bethylidae) are currently the most important insect natural enemies of wood borer pests, mainly buprestid and cerambycid beetles, in China. However, some sibling species of this genus are very difficult to distinguish because of their similar morphological features. To address this issue, we conducted phylogenetic and genetic analyses of cytoc...

Protein-enriched pea flour is toxic and repellent to three major stored grain pests, the rice weevil, Sitophilus oryzae (L.), the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum (Herbst) and rusty grain beetle, Cryptolestes ferrugineus (Stephens). A unique and valuable aspect of the protein-enriched pea flour is that it is not toxic several parasitoids that are associated with two of these insect pests. ...

The only bees native to the Hawaiian Islands form a single clade of 60 species in the genusHylaeus. The group is understudied and relatively poorly known. A data set consisting of 1201 base pairs of the mitochondrial genes cytochrome oxidase I and II and tRNALeucine, and 14 morphological characters was used to construct a phylogenetic tree for 48 of the 60 known species. Genetic variation was h...

Molecular genetic markers reveal differences between genotypes according to the presence of alleles (the same or different) at target loci. Microsatellite markers are especially useful co-dominant markers that have been used in a wide range of studies to elucidate the population structure and dynamics of a range of organisms, including agriculturally beneficial insects such as parasitic wasps (...