#antennating

Definitely not a stupid question, it's a bit of a confusing topic! In colloquial terms, yes, wasp is used to refer to Apocrita other than bees and ants, and that is also how I generally use it on this account. However, when we say those groups are also wasps, we're instead referring to the fact that excluding them creates a paraphyletic group (includes some descendants of a common ancestor but not all of them) as opposed to a monophyletic one (all descendants of a common ancestor, such as Apocrita). It's impossible to group wasps together monophyletically in a way that doesn't also include bees and ants, so if we want to view it as a single clade then they have to be included. But paraphyletic groups still have their uses and common names in general are a bit messy, which is why just referring to the latin names can be more useful a lot of the time, but can also potentially confuse some people further

As for sawflies, they're also paraphyletic and Apocrita emerged from them. You could just as easily call everything in Hymenoptera a sawfly if we're going by that logic but I don't see this brought up as often

In my opinion, it is useful to recognise that bees and ants aren't some disconnected groups given that they're so embedded within Apocrita but at the end of the day, it's quite contextual which definition you use

Can i offer you some nice bugges in this trying time?

I love bugs and would really like to work with them, but any time I look, it always seems to be for pest control :/

Here's a photo I took of a spotted nomad bee on wood forget-me-nots!

Where I live, most bees live in the ground or in rotting wood, don't have a hive-like social style, and don't produce honey. And I get to see the kleptoparasitic nomad bees in the spring, or Ceratina which designate "Cinderella daughters". Wasps are my favorite insects, but I can really tell how people who don't like or understand them don't really get bees either....