Mercedes Delfinado

Whilst at the USDA, Delfinado specialised in the study of bees at the Beneficial Insects Laboratory. This included the identification of the honey bee mite Acarapsis woodi and she was the first to report the presence of Melittiphis alvearius in the USA. Heavily involved with the International Journal of Acarology, she was a Chief Editor for over twenty years until her retirement in 1999. She and her husband retired to the Philippines, and she established a research fellowship on mite taxonomy in his honour.

Mercedes Delfinado (born 16 January 1933) is an acarologist from the Philippines, who was a recipient of a 1962 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a speciliast in bee mites, and published widely on insects of south-east Asia. For over twenty years she was a Chief Editor for the International Journal of Acarology. Multiple species were named in her honour.

Delfinado was born in Cabuyao, Philippines, on 16 January 1933. She graduated with an MSc in entomology from Cornell University in 1960. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 for her work on organisimic biology and ecology. In 1966 she graduated from the University of Hawai'i with a PhD in acarology. Whilst there she co-prepared a catalogue of Philippine Diptera. She married Edward W. Baker, also an acarologist, with whom she worked at the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Systematic Entomology Laboratory in Beltsville, building the collection there, and in 1999 expanding the premises to accommodate more researchers.