The genome sequence of the tree wasp, Dolichovespula sylvestris Scopoli, 1763

We present a genome assembly from an individual male Dolichovespula sylvestris (the tree wasp; Arthropoda; Insecta; Hymenoptera; Vespidae). The genome sequence is 233 megabases in span. The majority of the assembly (95.56%) is scaffolded into 26 chromosomal pseudomolecules. The mitochondrial genome was also assembled and is 21.3 kilobases in length.


Background
The tree wasp, Dolichovespula sylvestris, is a eusocial vespine wasp that builds relatively small paper nests with a grey envelope in concealed locations, often in cavities or underground, belying its name, although it will build in protected sites in trees (Spredbery, 1973). Nests typically have three or four layers of comb and have a maximum of a little over 200 workers at their peak (Archer, 2012). The colony cycle is short, typically from late May to the end of September, with males produced from late July (Edwards, 1980). Males form mating aggregations (Edwards, 1980), but queens typically mate with one or very few males (Foster & Ratnieks, 2001) meaning that most workers in a nest share the same parentage and are more closely related to their siblings than to the offspring of a fellow worker; worker reproduction is responsible for 50% of male eggs laid in a nest, but almost all of these are destroyed by fellow workers ('worker policing') or by the queen (Wenseleers et al., 2005). As with other social wasps in temperate climates, colonies are annual and only the mated queens over-winter, workers and males dying in the autumn. The new nest is constructed by the queen and the cycle begins again.
Dolichovespula sylvestris has a wide range throughout the Palaearctic, reaching 66°N (Archer, 2012). It is a widespread species in Britain and Ireland, including on islands, but is thought to be declining (Edwards & Telfer, 2002). Nests can be usurped throughout much of its range by the socially parasitic Dolichovespula omissa, but this species has not been found in Britain yet. As with other vespines, a wide variety of food is taken, which is mostly made up of insects but can include carrion. Adult wasps are frequent flower visitors and are considered to be important pollinators of common figwort (Scrophularia nodosa) (Proctor et al., 1996).
The evolution of social behaviour in the Hymenoptera is a huge area of research. Until recently, there had been no Vespinae genomes available, so the publication of genomes of species of Vespa (Crowley et al., 2022), Vespula (Crowley et al., 2021) and now Dolichovespula complement the existing genomes of Polistinae (Patalano et al., 2015;Standage et al., 2016), the other vespid subfamily with eusocial societies.

Genome sequence report
The genome was sequenced from a single male D. sylvestris ( Figure 1) collected from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire (biological vice-county: Berkshire), UK (latitude 51.770, longitude -1.331). A total of 27-fold coverage in Pacific Biosciences single-molecule long reads and 175-fold coverage in 10X Genomics read clouds were generated. Primary assembly contigs were scaffolded with chromosome conformation Hi-C data. Manual assembly curation corrected 158 missing/misjoins, increasing the assembly size by 3.47%, the scaffold number by 40.00% and the scaffold N50 by 70.68%.

Sample acquisition and DNA extraction
A single male D. sylvestris (iyDolSylv1) was collected from Wytham Woods, Oxfordshire (biological vice-county: Berkshire), UK (latitude 51.770, longitude -1.331) by Steven Falk, independent researcher, from woodland using a net. The sample was identified by the same individual and snap-frozen on dry ice.
DNA was extracted at the Tree of Life laboratory, Wellcome Sanger Institute. The iyDolSylv1 sample was weighed and dissected on dry ice with tissue set aside for Hi-C sequencing. Thorax tissue was cryogenically disrupted to a fine powder using a Covaris cryoPREP Automated Dry Pulveriser, receiving multiple impacts. Fragment size analysis of 0.01-0.5 ng of DNA was then performed using an Agilent FemtoPulse. High molecular weight (HMW) DNA was extracted using the Qiagen Plant MagAttract HMW DNA extraction kit. Low molecular weight DNA was removed from a 200-ng aliquot of extracted DNA using 0.8X AMpure XP purification kit prior to 10X Chromium sequencing; a minimum of 50 ng DNA was submitted for 10X sequencing. HMW DNA was sheared into an average fragment size between 12-20 kb in a Megaruptor 3 system with    described previously (Howe et al., 2021). Manual curation was performed using HiGlass (Kerpedjievet al., 2018) and Pretext. The mitochondrial genome was assembled using MitoHiFi (Uliano-Silva et al., 2021), which performed annotation using MitoFinder (Allioet al., 2020). The genome was analysed and BUSCO scores generated within the BlobToolKit environment (Challis et al., 2020). Table 3 contains a list of all software tool versions used, where appropriate.

Ethics/compliance issues
The materials that have contributed to this genome note have been supplied by a Darwin Tree of Life Partner. The submission