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xiv, 256 pages : illustrations (chiefly color) ; The wasp superfamily Apoidea -- a group composed of more than 20,000 species of solitary, cleptoparasitic, and social bees, as well as a paraphyletic grade of more than 9,600 species of predatory and cleptoparasitic wasps -- has played an outsized role in the history of behavioral research. Favorite subjects of field naturalists and ethologists for more than two hundred years, these insects have evolved a tremendous diversity of behavioral strategies, each one an equally successful variation on a shared ancestral groundplan. Understanding the course of these evolutionary derivations and innovations is an important part of understanding insect behavior in toto, and one that requires a phylogenetically informed, comparative approach. As a contribution to ongoing efforts in apoid phylogenetic systematics -- and by extension to the study of behavioral evolution within the group -- the current work presents four phylogenetic studies of apoid taxa, with an additional fifth study examining the placement of Apoidea within Hymenoptera as a whole. Each provides some insight into the evolution of a complex behavioral syndrome, namely the development of predatory behavior from within a parasitoid wasp clade (Chapter II), the origins of cleptoparasitism in apid bees (Chapter III), trends in prey choice among philanthine wasps (Chapters IV and V), and innovations in nesting behavior within thread-waisted wasps (Chapter VI). In the first of these studies, I use a combination of direct optimization phylogeny reconstruction and clade sensitivity analysis to re-examine a previously published total evidence dataset based on 111 taxa from across Hymenoptera. This new analysis simultaneously reveals and formalizes deep topological instabilities within this important insect order, and shows how such instability can complicate back-of-the-envelope reconstructions of behavioral evolution (e.g., the origins of aculeate predatory behavior from within a paraphyletic "Parasitica"). In the ...