S. Mahunka szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 58. (Budapest, 1997)

222 L. Zombori and V. Frmolenko In the interglacial period the situation significantly changed. The forested areas moved north, advancing as far up as the Baltic Sea, and the tundra softened into taiga. The vegetation in the basin of the Mediterranean Sea expanded northward, while the area from the latitude of 40 degrees might have been arid. However, a brief cold spell which set in some 10 000 years ago again practically exterminated the woods north from the line of the Carpathians-Black Sea. The repeated, slow forestation finally brought about the conditions that we know and study today from zoogeographical point of view with special reference to Symphyta, a suborder of Hymenoptera. HISTORICAL PRELIMINARIES The history of sawflies and woodwasps of the Caipathian Basin has never been studied in detail, let alone frilly elaborated. In the second half of the last century it was S. Mocsáry whose early scientific endeavours included some papers on this group but it mainly dealt with the description of new taxa. The important work, published in several volumes the fauna of the Carpathian Basin, entitled the Magyar Birodalom Állatvilága (Fauna Regni Hungáriáé), though it was a milestone in faunal research, gave only lists of species found within the boundaries of historical Hungary. In 1955 a new series of books was launched: Magyarország Állatvilága (Fauna Hungáriáé) which set the goal to give an overall survey of the fauna of Hungary, but in the majority of the cases the parts discussed the fauna of the Caipathian Basin. In this series the senior author has published three parts of 353 printed pages on sawflies. But according to the primary aims of the books, they are nothing more than identification keys with a little extra on host-plants and flight periods. So not much is found in them making reference to faunal history. Basic works coming from the surrounding countries, especially those presently occupying territories in the Caipathian Basin are badly needed, but there are none. So our neighbours have done nothing better than us, if anything at all. Some stray lists of species, rather unreliable handbooks of identification are known to have been published, which are of no avail to solve the present problem. Alone perhaps, it is the works of the second author, publishing mostly in Ukrainian, which tried to tackle some aspects of biology, ecology and zoogeography when writing about Caipathian sawflies. Our research focused on five basic materials: 1. the collection of the Department of Zoology of the Hungarian Natural History Museum (Budapest), 2. the material of the Schmalhausen Institute of Zoology, Kiev, 3. the museum collections of other countries, like, e.g., the Brukenthal Museum (Natural History) in Romania, 4. the materials of recent collectings made mostly in Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, furthermore, in Serbia and Bulgaria, 5. records published by foreign authors especially those of the neighbouring countries. Sawfly research within the Caipathian Basin has no long-standing tradition. So one may readily comprehend why local lists of species mainly adhering to some popular holiday resorts or to the residence of a few enthusiastic collectors were not really of avail. Thus, we may declare that material reflecting regular collecting activity is almost non-existent. Bearing this in mind extensive collectings have been made in the Carpathian Basin with special emphasis on Transylvania and in the trans-Carpathian territories, i.e., the southern exposition of the Southern Carpathians and the eastern face of the Eastern Carpathians, as far up as the Ukrainian part, like the Mt. Hoverla.