Colletes eous (Morice)

Weissmann, Julie A., Picanco, Ana, Borges, Paulo A. V. & Schaefer, Hanno, 2017, Bees of the Azores: an annotated checklist (Apidae, Hymenoptera), ZooKeys 642, pp. 63-95 : 71

Colletes eous (Morice)

Description.

Medium-sized bee (total length 10-13 mm in both sexes, wing length c. 8 mm in females) with orange brown hairy thorax and dark abdomen with white hairy tergite margins (Fig. 4 a–b).

Distinguishing features.

Medium-sized bee with light brown thorax and conspicuously black and white ringed abdomen.

General distribution.

Mediterranean region to Central Asia ( Kuhlmann 2005).

Distribution in the Azores.

São Miguel and Santa Maria.

First record.

1972.

Nesting.

See above.

Social behaviour.

Solitary.

Foraging.

Based on literature polylectic.

Phenology.

June-July.

Material.

Santa Maria (Vila do Porto), July 1972, 1 male, leg. N.L.H. Krauss, coll. Snow Entomological Museum, Lawrence, Kansas; São Miguel (Mosteiros), 24.07.2004, 1 male, leg. A. Kroupa, coll. Kroupa (M. Kuhlmann, pers. comm., 28.09.2016); Santa Maria, July 2001, 1 female, leg. H. Schaefer, det. M. Kuhlmann, coll. TUM (B46).

Note.

According to M. Kuhlmann, Kiel (pers. comm., 23.11.2015) earlier reports of Colletes canescens Smith 1853, from the islands, most likely refer to this species.

DNA barcoding of specimen B46 (acc. no. KX824776) and BLAST search in GenBank resulted in Colletes eous from Greece as best match (acc. no. EF028501). However, the similarity is only 94%, which means that there are 23 nucleotide differences distributed over the entire COI sequences (see also branch length difference in the ML tree, Fig. 2). This suggests that the Azorean Colletes is not the same species as the one sequenced from Greece but more morphological and genetic data is needed to solve this question.