In a group of its own? Rediscovery of one of the world’s rarest and highest mountain bumblebees, Bombus tanguticus

Abstract

The distinctive, large bumblebee Bombus tanguticus Morawitz was described from yellow-banded queens (females) collected from high elevations on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) by Nikolay Przhevalsky’s fourth Central Asia expedition. One of Morawitz’s syntype females is designated here as lectotype. Because of the distinctive female morphology, Pittioni placed the species in a subgenus of its own, Tanguticobombus. Surprisingly, in the 130 years since its description, and despite extensive sampling of bumblebees across the QTP, records for just seven more individuals of B. tanguticus have been published, all queens. In this paper I report two recently collected workers (females) that extend the known distribution of the species and describe a new white-banded colour pattern from one of the workers. Available data on the species’ distribution are mapped, the location of the collecting site for the highest confirmed records of any bumblebees worldwide at c. 5640 m above sea level is discussed, and the closest relatives of the species identified, placing it in the lapidarius-group of the subgenus Melanobombus and most likely close to the European B. lapidarius.

KEYWORDS:

• DNA barcode
• bumble bee
• pollinators
• taxonomy
• Tibet

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to all of those who have collected specimens and maintained collections. My thanks to: J. An and J. Huang for organizing sampling visits to Qinghai; Y. Astafurova, L. Best, S. Droege, A. Monfared, R. Raina, D. Sheppard, C. Starr, and J. Yao for access to specimens; R. Canty, T. Lecocq, L. Packer, S. Russell, and C. Thanoosing for COI sequences; S. Strong (Royal Geographical Society, London) for access to archive material from the 1921 Everest Expedition; to L. Bailey, R. Hatfield, D. Notton, and M. Seddon for discussions; to H. Taylor for bee images; and to anonymous referees for helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

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Additional information

Funding

Work in China was supported by: the Special Fund for Agro-scientific Research in the Public Interest [201203080-4]; the Agricultural Science and Technology Innovation Program [CAAS-ASTIP-2015-IAR]; the International Exchange and Cooperation Program in Agriculture [A6950]; and the SAFEA High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Program [GDJ20150326001].