4. Resumé of Recent Progress in our Knowledge of the 
Indian Wasps and Bees.! 
By Cepric Dover, F.E.S. 
(Read at the Ninth Annual Meeting of the Indian Science Congress.) 
When Lt.-Col. C. T. Bingham’s volume on the wasps and 
bees in the “‘ Fauna of British India” series appeared in 1897 
about a thousand species were described ; but the stimulus the 
work gave to the study of the group has caused the number of 
species now known from the Indian region to be almost 
doubled (as the writer of the review of the book in Nature 
predicted), and numerous other additions to our knowledge of 
1897 have also been made. Of recent years the fact that this 
mass of information is scattered through a number of journals 
no doubt accounts for the general falling-oft of interest in the 
subject by entomologists in this country, and now the only 
really serious workers on the group are a few European 
specialists. 
It is hoped that this brief review will draw the attention 
of the Editors of the ‘“‘ Fauna ”’ series to the urgent need of a 
new edition of Bingham’s volume with all up-to-date informa- 
tion: This | am afraid would be too laborious a task for one 
man, so that it would perhaps be best to issue the work in 
three volumes: Introduction and Diploptera, Fossores, and 
Anthophila ; each written by a specialist or some one willing 
and in a position to undertake the work. 
Of recent Indian entomologists who have done work on 
the Hymenoptera I may meation Mr. T. V. Ramakrishna 
Aiyar of the Agricultural College in Coimbatore, who has 
the wasps and bees by compiling a catalogue of the new 
species,' which with a few additions could easily be brought up- 
to-date. Mr. G. R. Dutt of Pusa appears to have confined 
himself mainly to the biological aspect of the subject, but has 
also published a few purely systematic papers on the Fossores.’ 
His paper in the Entomological series of Memoirs of the Depart- 
ment of Agriculture for 1912 is one of the most thorough 
investigations into the life-history and habits of the group 
that has yet been published in the East. Notes on the habits 






| Journ. Bomb. Nat. Hist. Soc. XXIV-XXV, 1916-17. ; 
See Rec. Ind Mus. XVI, p. 259, 1919; also Mem, Dept. Agrie. 
Ind. Entom. Series, VII, p. 29, 1921. 
