Plate Nº 56 · recorded October 8, 2026
Biology & EvolutionReported finding
Colombia's First National Bee Checklist Counts 738 Species
Colombia's first national bee checklist documents 738 species, 246 of them new country records, with an estimated 1,400 bees likely living there in total.
By James Calloway3 min read646 words
In brief
- Colombia's first national bee checklist documents 738 species, 246 newly recorded for the country.
- The team estimates around 1,400 bee species actually live in Colombia, leaving about 25% unreported or undescribed.
- 20% of documented species are found only in Colombia.
- About 40% of Colombia's bee species are social, versus 10% in temperate regions.
- Local insect collections supplied 70% of the records in the checklist.
Colombia now has a documented count of 738 bee species, including 246 recorded in the country for the first time, according to the first annotated national bee checklist ever compiled for any country in the Western Hemisphere.
The checklist, published in the journal PeerJ, raises the known bee diversity of Colombia well above earlier estimates, which ranged from 466 to 604 species. A team led by Margarita M. López-Uribe, the Nancy and John Steimer Professor of Agricultural Sciences and associate professor of entomology at Penn State, and doctoral student Ruben D. Martín-Rojas compiled the work together with 44 partners from 31 institutions.
The researchers estimate the true number is even higher — closer to 1,400 species — meaning roughly 25% of Colombia's bees likely remain unreported or undescribed by science.
Why build a bee checklist?
Species checklists may look like simple lists, but they serve a core scientific function. "Species checklists may sound simple, but they are critical tools we have to document and conserve biodiversity by reporting changes over time," López-Uribe said.
The project addresses a long-standing imbalance in bee research. Scientists have studied bees most intensively in temperate regions such as North America and Europe, while tropical regions remain under-sampled. That gap distorts the global picture of where and how bees live.
"Bees are among the most important pollinators in both natural and agricultural ecosystems, but their patterns of diversity vary significantly between temperate regions, where they have been studied the most, and tropical regions, where we did our study," López-Uribe said.
Colombia sits in northern South America and acts as a land bridge between Central and South America. The country holds world records for several groups of organisms — the most bird, orchid, palm, freshwater fish and butterfly species anywhere. Bees break that pattern: the tropics generally host fewer bee species than subtropical zones, a pattern that, according to López-Uribe, may be partly driven by huge gaps in data from tropical regions rather than by biology alone.
What did the checklist find?
The new document offers the most complete picture to date of bee biodiversity in Colombia. Beyond the headline count, it reveals several distinctive traits of the country's bee fauna:
- Endemism: 20% of the 738 species occur only in Colombia and nowhere else.
- Social life: about 40% of Colombian bee species are social, compared with only 10% in temperate regions like North America and Europe.
- Nesting habits: most Colombian bees nest above ground, whereas 70% of temperate species nest underground.
- Diversity hotspot: the greatest species richness turned up in the Andean region, with its wide range of climates — not in the dry habitats that typically harbor peak bee diversity in temperate zones.
These differences suggest that conservation strategies designed around temperate-zone bee biology may not transfer cleanly to tropical settings, where social behavior and above-ground nesting play much larger roles.
How did local collections help?
The checklist leans heavily on specimens already held in Colombia. "Insect collections are invaluable archives of biodiversity," Martín-Rojas said. "For this study, local collections contributed 70% of the records reported in the checklist."
That figure underscores how decades of accumulated museum and university holdings, rather than new field surveys alone, made the national accounting possible. It also highlights where the data remain thin: the authors point to areas with major data deficiencies, which future sampling will need to target.
Because the team estimates that around a quarter of Colombia's bee species are still undocumented, the 738-species figure should be read as a floor, not a ceiling. The gap between documented and estimated diversity marks the checklist as a baseline for measuring future discoveries — and future declines.
The study, "The first annotated checklist of the bees of Colombia reveals an overlooked diversity and areas with major data deficiencies," appears in PeerJ (DOI: 10.7717/peerj.21684).
via Phys.org Biology (Source)
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