Haris Attila: Hymenoptera Research in the Carpathian Basin - Natura Somogyiensis 29. (Kaposvár, 2016)
Introdution
6 Natura Somogyiensis What is included in this work and what is not? Better to start with "what is not included". There are two things: Myrmecology (Formicoidea) and Apiculture. Ants are not included, because it is a very special group of Hymenoptera with special way of collection, and special way of life history therefore their study is particular and this group has its own specialists who are not dealing with other Aculeata groups. About apiculture. We have no possibility to discuss this huge topic in two points of view. At first, there are only few people (or even less) who keep honey bees and parallel as a hobby, collect gold wasps or wild bees. But the main reason, to omit apiculture is the extraordinary huge number of papers on this topic. Nowadays, there are three apicul- tural journal only in Hungary: "Méhészet" (Apiculture), "Magyar Méhészújság" (Hungarian Journal of Apiculture), "Méhészújság" (Journal of Apiculture) appearing month by month. One publishes, let's say 25 articles per one issue, it means approximately 75 articles on honey bee in one months only in Hungary. Than we have to multiply this with the articles published in the 11 countries of the Carpathian Basin. After this extrapolating this number with the 170 years of apicultural journals and periodic papers, and adding technical books on honey bee keeping of 10 countries, in this way we receive 100 thousands of papers, articles to process and discuss here. It is close to impossible and finally we should add the thousands of apicultural papers published in various horticultural and agricultural journals. Except apiculture and myrmecology, present study includes all other research of Aculeata species of the Carpathian Basin in the following aspects: systematics, faunistics, ecology, life history, anatomy, plant protection, agriculture including pollination of fruits and crops, toxicology (stings and toxins, their symptoms, mechanisms and treatments) and paleontology. Since the completion of the first entomological work of Hungary in (Bocskay and Hoefnagel: Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta) our knowledge on the Aculeata fauna has been highly increased: more than 1550 papers, books and monographs were published and the number of the preserved Aculeata specimens from the Carpathian Basin exceeded the 800 000 specimens in the various collections in and around the Carpathian Basin. For our days, the known number of species from the firstly recorded two "species" (Fucus and Apis) reached nearly the 1500. The intention of this paper to provide a picture on the 420 years history of the Aculeata research from the very beginning till now. Our age (the last 25 years) seems to be nothing compared the more than 400 years of research, however, this period is still exceptional. We are on the point to move our written culture from the printed data transfer (Guttenberg culture) to digital data transfer (World Wide Web). Net publications are not discussed here. The next decades (or century) shall be the years of resolving the long term preservation (for centuries or millenniums) the digital, computerized information. Let's see a trivial example, when we type into a search software the national names of Vespa crabro in the numerous languages of the nations of the Carpathian Basin (like: lódarázs, Szerszen europejski, etc.) only for one species we receive 101 600 matches, and thousands of sites. We can not handle this, since even the most respectful site, the Wikipedia is full of dead links. Furthermore, we can not expect readers of this book to type the frequently complicated URLs from printed pages to the net and when they succeed it (let's say after 50 years from publishing this paper, somewhere in the 2070's) they will learn, that this site has been dead for 40 years and receive only error message. The task of our age is to find the way, to preserve the digital culture for the next centuries as printed papers, clay tablets, stone carvings have been preserving our culture for hundreds or even thousands of years.
