Just to confirm, you don’t think of jewel wasps, spider wasps, sand wasps, and flower wasps as wasps, since they’re not part of the Vespidae, correct?
Negative, those are all considered wasps alongside Vespidae. I said “that logic doesn’t check out” because what you had essentially said in that previous reply was “if wasp==wasp and wasp==wasp, then so are ants and bees”, which is… well… false.
It also erases the very wasp-like nature of ant ancestors
That ancestry is pretty much expressed in Formicidae belonging to the Aculeata infraorder, though I do agree that putting them under some sort of vespid superfamily would be even more fitting, since ants pretty much did evolve from wasps.
Negative, those are all considered wasps alongside Vespidae. I said “that logic doesn’t check out” because what you had essentially said in that previous reply was “if wasp==wasp and wasp==wasp, then so are ants and bees”, which is… well… false.
That ancestry is pretty much expressed in Formicidae belonging to the Aculeata infraorder, though I do agree that putting them under some sort of vespid superfamily would be even more fitting, since ants pretty much did evolve from wasps.