Tapinoma simrothi Krausse 1911

Tapinoma simrothi Krausse, 1911 (Figure 4) Tapinoma erraticum var. simrothi Krausse, 1911, p. 18 (w.) Italy (Sardinia). Palaearctic. Diagnosis Worker. Body colour dark brown to black, with brown legs; anterior clypeal margin with deep median notch; scapes slightly long, surpass posterior margin of head by about onethird of scape length in full-face view; funicular segments at least twice as long as broad; body surfaces covered with profuse appressed pale pubescence. Material examined. Three sites: 9; 25; 28. Geographic range. This species is broadly spread in the Palaearctic region, especially through the Mediterranean Basin (Sharaf 2006), extending eastwards into all countries of the Arabian Peninsula (Collingwood 1985; Collingwood and Agosti 1996; Collingwood et al. 1997; Sharaf et al. 2018b, 2020b), Iran (Pashaei Rad et al. 2018), and Afghanistan (Rigato and Toni 2011). Ecology and biology. This species nests directly in the ground and attends mealybugs (Sharaf and Aldawood 2011), with the occurrence of Solenopsis abdita Thompson, 1989. Karami-jamour et al. (2018) documented T. simrothi attending numerous species of aphids for honeydew and protecting them against predators.