The gender of Heriades Spinola 1808 is feminine. Spinola (1808: 7) proposed Heriades, and included several species without giving explicit combinations in the new genus. However, he did (p.9) present two new species names, as 'Heriades pusilla, [H.] sinuata, mihi,' which clearly indicates his use of the genus name as feminine. An etymological commentary by Doug Yanega (Yahoo BeeMonitoring Listserv, 5 October, 2015) is here noted, for reference: 'Dalla Torre and Friese were absolutely wrong; there is no form of the noun for wool - either "eiros" or "erion" - which would be spelled as "Eriades". The term "eriodes" would mean "woolly". If you look at Spinola, his entire paper was written in Latin, and he uses the forms "Heriadibus" and "Heriadum", which indicate that the word "Heriades" is a 3rd-declension plural noun, so the singular form would be "Heriad" - either a son of Eris (which would be masculine), or a mountain nymph (which would be feminine). He included two feminine species, so we know which of the two he intended'