Hattena tongana (Manson, 1974)

Edbarellus tonganus Manson, 1974: 116.

Hattena tongana . - Halliday 1997: 188.

Hattena tonganus . - Klimov et al. 2016.

Type depository.

Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Levin, New Zealand; United States National Museum, Washington, D.C., USA; Entomology Division, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Auckland, New Zealand.

Type locality and habitat.

Pacific Ocean Region, Kingdom of Tonga, Tongatapu Island, in a hive of European honey bee, Apis mellifera ( Hymenoptera).

Remarks.

I suspect this species to be a junior synonym of Hattena panopla . Halliday (1997) reported many extreme similarities between Hattena tongana and H. panopla, but he did not consider them to be conspecific. Differences in shape of sternal shields described by Halliday (1997) could be questionable due to the weak sclerotization of the sternal shield and its margins, characterstic of Hattena . However, I adopted in this paper the interpretation of Halliday (1997), considering them distinct species.