Coelioxys alatus Foerster, 1853

Cornalba, Maurizio, Quaranta, Marino, Selis, Marco, Flaminio, Simone, Gamba, Sirio, Mei, Maurizio, Bonifacino, Marco, Cappellari, Andree, Catania, Roberto, Niolu, Pietro, Tempesti, Stefano & Biella, Paolo, 2024, Exploring the hidden riches: Recent remarkable faunistic records and range extensions in the bee fauna of Italy (Hymenoptera, Apoidea, Anthophila), Biodiversity Data Journal 12, pp. 116014-116014 : 116014

Coelioxys alatus Foerster, 1853

Materials

Type status: Other material. Occurrence: recordedBy: Elena Gazzea; sex: 1 female; occurrenceID: BCE7F4EA-DA44-5A3B-BAB9-65C20C6525AE; Location: countryCode: IT; stateProvince: Veneto; county: Belluno; municipality: Voltago Agordino; verbatimElevation: 990 m; verbatimLatitude: 46.2662; verbatimLongitude: 11.9975; Identification: identifiedBy: Maurizio Mei, Andree Cappellari; Event: eventDate: 2021-08-10 /22; Record Level: collectionCode: MZUR

Notes

Caught in a pan trap in an area with a significant presence of Megachile ligniseca (Kirby, 1802), the main host of the species. This is the first confirmed record of C. alatus for Italy. Discover Life ( Ascher and Pickering 2023) indicates the presence of the species in Italy, without details. It is not clear what this claim is based on. A possible source is Stöckl (2000), where C. alatus is mentioned as (doubtfully) occurring in Südtirol, based on Biegeleben (1929). However, Biegeleben's paper, which is a general exposition of parasitism in bees, does not contain records of C. alatus or, for that matter, of any bee species. The only place where C. alatus is mentioned is a list of host bees and their parasites in the last two pages of the paper, preceded by a sentence which, in English translation, reads: "We owe to Prof. Dr. Bischoff, who excels in the study of the biology of Hymenoptera , a detailed table of the different species of host bees and their parasites. Some of them, namely the ones that are most widespread in our region, are listed here according to this table". In the case at hand, "widespread" likely does not refer to C. alatus , which is rare everywhere in Europe ( Devalez 2010), but to its host Megachile ligniseca which is ubiquitous, though uncommon, in Südtirol. For good measure, we inspected the Biegeleben collection, now housed in the Museo Civico di Zoologia in Rome, but could not locate any specimens of C. alatus . Images: Fig. 5 .

Figures

Figure 5. Coelioxys alatus Foerster, 1853 female from Voltago Agordino, (A) habitus; (B) end tergites and sternites.