I've just moved a bunch of wasp cocoon images, most of which had been ID'd as braconids, into
a new Ichneumonoidea cocoon section. Rather than make the same comments on each image, I thought I'd summarize my thinking here.
I believe this is the only true
Meteorus (Braconidae) cocoon we have in BugGuide (although the cocoon and the wasp at right, which was reared from it, are still sitting in Ichneumonoidea waiting for someone to confirm that it is a braconid):
I'm basing that on its resemblance to the
Meteorus autographae cocoon shown on
this page.
There are several other hanging-on-a-string wasp cocoons, all of which had been placed in Braconidae, identified as probably
Meteorus because they were hanging on a string. However, I read in a book on parasitic insects that "a few Braconidae, e.g.
Meteorus, and Ichneumonidae,
Charops, have cocoons suspended from vegetation by long, silken cords..." I did a Google image search of
Charops, and found
this one. Yes, it's from Indonesia, but there are members of this genus in North America. Note how similar this one is to some of the hanging ones that had been called braconids. Like this one (granted, it's a much longer string):
And then there are some others that aren't hanging on strings, but seem to have been ID'd as braconids based on the pattern being similar to the one above, which I'm now suspecting is an ichneumonid. Such as:
And then there's this dangly one, which seems to me pretty different from both the
Meteorus and the
Charops images I found:
If anyone has further information that will help sort these out, please share!