O. Merkl szerk.: Folia Entomologica Hungarica 66. (Budapest, 2005)

these countries which are as follows: former Czechoslovakia 1019, England 1091, Germany 1485, Hungary 1798, Ireland 529, Italy 866 and Poland 1036. Most recently the endeavour of Fauna Europaea, having been in operation since 2000, seems to extend and prosper the faunistic investigation around our continent. The aim of the programme is as follows: "Fauna Europaea is developing a web based information infrastructure to provide an index of scientific names of all living European land and freshwater animals, and their geographical distribution at country level." (cited from a leaflet). The biodiversity exploration, a favoured slogan for the traditional floristic and faunistic detection of Europe, will certainly promote our profound faunistic knowledge of the braconid wasps in our continent as well as in Hungary. The compilation of the present checklist is based on the braconid collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum, Budapest and that of the Bakony Natural History Museum, Zirc (West Hungary) on the one hand, and on the numerous publications by Hungarian and foreign experts, on the other (see References and the Literature). Those faunistic contributions were disregarded which proved to be dubious or absurd in the light of our present knowledge of braconids. Fortunately, such data are very sporadic in the literature. In the checklist all taxa (subfamilies, tribes, genera, and species) are arranged alphabetically to facilitate their retrieval. Up to the end of 2004 the total number of the braconid species distributed in Hungary attains 1798. The overwhelming majority of the valid species listed here are documented in the two museums indicated before. Exceptions were made with a very few species, their contributions in the literature are considered as authenticated identifications. The synonymous names are restricted to the ones based originally on western Palaearctic braconid material. Synonymous names based on Nearctic (or other zooregional) material were not taken into consideration. For instance, the agathidine generic name Lytopylus VIERECK, 1905 was applied to Nearctic species and later proved to refer to (or junior synonymous with) the generic name Agathis LATREILLE, 1804 set up for western Palaearctic species. In the subsequent checklist the synonymous names are added under the valid names slightly indented in the column and before the names with a = sign. The braconid species of Hungary belong to 29 subfamilies, the species number of each subfamily is as follows (subfamilies in alphabetical order): Adeliinae 2 species (= sp.), Agathidinae 46 sp., Alysiinae/Alysiini 210 sp., Alysiinae/ Dacnusini 233 sp., Blacinae 32 sp., Brachistinae 87 sp., Braconinae 159 sp., Cardiochilinae 1 sp., Cenocoeliinae 2 sp., Cheloninae 124 sp., Dirrhopinae 1 sp., Doryctinae 49 sp., Euphorinae 79 sp., Gnamptodontinae 8 sp., Helconinae 26 sp., Homolobinae 5 sp., Hormiinae 30 sp., Ichneutinae 3 sp., Macrocentrinae 21 sp., Meteorinae 30 sp., Microgastrinae 312 sp., Microtypinae 2 sp., Miracinae 1 sp., Neoneurinae4