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Photo#1137693
Cima Pepsis - Pepsis pallidolimbata - female

Cima Pepsis - Pepsis pallidolimbata - Female
Cima, Mojave National Preserve, San Bernardino County, California, USA
August 2, 2015
A large number of these tarantula hawks were (as usual :-) excitedly nectaring on milkweed flowers (here the milkweed Asclepias erosa). Nine Pepsis are visible in this photo below:



The one in this photo is a female...from the convolute (= curled) antennae.

In identifying this I used Townes(1)(1957), Hurd(2)(1952), and Vardy(2002)...together with the catalog of Krombein(3)(1979) for range summaries. For males, most couplets in the keys focus mainly on characters of the subgenital plate and other thing not easily discernible in photos. But for females, the keys are a bit more usable...see the remarks in an earlier post here. By reading the descriptions and noting ranges I was able to quite confidently arrive at P. pallidolimbata here. Among the more common species that range in the area here, the lack of a dark submarginal band on the wing tips eliminates P. thisbe (and others), and the non-orange antennae eliminate P. mildei.