Definition of "aculeate" []

• Biology Having a stinger, as a bee or wasp. (adjective)
• Botany Having sharp prickles. (adjective)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "He points out that all of the branches or groups technically called clades known to have primitively eusocial species—aculeate wasps, halictine and xylocopine bees, sponge-nesting shrimp, termopsid termites, colonial aphids and thrips, ambrosia beetles, and naked mole rats—rely on colonies that build and occupy defensible nests."
• "The evolutionary origin and elaboration of sociality in the aculeate Hymenoptera: Maternal effects, sib-social effects, and heterochrony."
• "Dispersed in the grasslands are trees of Crecentia cujete, Ceiba pentandra, Lecythis minor, Ochroma pyramidale, Prosopis juliflora, Cavanillesia platanifolia and palms trees of Sabal mauritiiformis, Acrocomia aculeate, Attalea butyracea and several Bactris spp."