vespine

comparative more vespine · superlative most vespine

1. Of, relating to, or characteristic of wasps.

   Ori braced himself, dropped with a cry when a ghost image of the wasp returned in air again momentarily varicose, and went, and came back once more, now nothing but a vespine insinuation, and was, finally, all gone.

   2004, China Miéville, Iron Council

plural vespines

1. biologyAny wasp of the subfamily Vespinae.

   1 more example

   It has previously been argued that preimaginal differentiation of workers and queens is an underlying, unifying feature of polistines and vespines (Gadagkar 1991; Hunt 1991; O’Donnell 1998; Hunt 2006, 2007; Hunt et al. 2007). The results (fig. 2; supplementary figs. S1 and S2, Supplementary Material online) support this proposed framework of eusocial evolution, whereby two distinct developmental trajectories exist for both polistine and vespine female offspring during larval development (Hunt 2007): […]

   2018, Patrick K Piekarski et al., “Phylogenomic Evidence Overturns Current Conceptions of Social Evolution in Wasps (Vespidae)”, in Molecular Biology and Evolution, archived from the original on 27 Feb 2025