A review of 250 years of South African bee taxonomy and exploration (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila)

Abstract

South Africa is recognised as a global centre of bee diversity. Here we assess the status of taxonomic activity and exploration of its bee fauna over the past 250 years. The rate of species description for bees has been increasing at a constant level since the 1950s. However, our data shows an increase in the species described per taxonomist, suggesting a number of bee species still remain undiscovered. Reinforcing this conclusion, over two thirds of South Africa has been critically under-sampled for bees and ∼98% of the country has received little survey effort (<100 records per ∼ 25 km × 25 km grid cell). Decline in local taxonomic capacity and an increase in ecosystem service, pollination and conservation research highlights the immediate need for developing expertise in South African bees. DNA barcoding is therefore seen as an important component of future integrative taxonomic approaches. At present, <10% of South African bee species have sequences available, with only ∼3% for specimens collected within South Africa. We suggest that the results presented here may be reflective of the general knowledge of South Africa’s entomofauna. To expedite the documentation and exploration of insects – an economic and ecologically important group facing increased threats of extinction – demands urgent commitment and investment from universities, research institutions and government.

Keywords:

• species inventory
• species discovery
• taxonomic effort
• species accumulation
• bee species description
• collector contribution
• collector effort
• DNA barcode
• natural science collections
• museums
• taxonomists

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to thank the following curators for specimen data: Simon van Noort, Connal Eardley and Sarah Gess. We are grateful to Willem Coetzer, who was an enormous help in extracting data from the Catalogue of Afrotropical bees and The National Collection of Insects and Albany Museum’s specimen databases. We also wish to thank Greg Duckworth and Felix Forest for help with R code to extract sequence data from GenBank and BOLD.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

A.M. is grateful to Elizabeth Parker and the Mapula Trust for post-doctoral funding. J.F.C. is supported by a National Research Foundation RCA-fellowship (grant no. 91442).