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Hello, I want to ask about distinguishing characters between two very similar species of Peribaea - apicalis and longirostris. I have one season yield of nearly 500 specimens that could be identified as longirostris, but following Andersen it mostly recorded from Italy and should be very rare, so variability of apicalis? Thanks for your help.

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Abdominal tergites with conspicuous yellow bands along hind margins.

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:o ... 500 specimens in a year?! I haven't even seen one here! :D

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Chris, we know your situation there in the west... If it is really Peribaea longirostris, than I haven't seen P. apicalis, what is rather strange!

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Just looked at Andersen (1996) ... is P.apicalis a synonym of anything there or is it an addition since his keys? :)

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A synonym of Peribaea minuta..

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Hmm, I see what you mean ... everything points to P.longirostris from the photos. I wonder though, as P.longirostris was a sp.nov. in 1996 ... how many of the P.apicalis records are prior to that and should be revised in light of the split? It could be that P.longirostris is far commoner and wider distributed than we think.

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need to really check this, but first impression is very OK.

It is my impression that longirostris is / might be the most northern of the three apicalis / tibialis / longirostris.
InNL, it is found (but very rarely) in Calluna heath

We could make a nice trade of Peribaea material

Theo

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Just checked my Peribaea "holdings" (sounds very grand) but I have just: 1x real P.apicalis from Russia (I double-checked it now - caught by a chap we all know - Nikita Vikhrev :D); 1x P.discicornis from Portugal; 1x P.setinervis from England; and a lot of P.tibialis from Portugal and Spain ... hmm, I wonder who might have caught those Portuguese specimens? ;) I don't know whether this adds much to the distributional information though :)

I just wonder how many pre-1996 records for apicalis have been double-checked to eliminate longirostris?