First record of the banded bee, Amegilla mucorea (Klug, 1845), in Morocco


Published on: February 19, 2020, Submitted by Patrick Lhomme on: February 11, 2020


Amegilla bees are commonly named banded bees because of their black abdomen with white stripes. They are medium-sized bees (10-12 mm in length) with golden brown hairs on the head and thorax. There are around 260 species worldwide, including 7 species known in Morocco. We describe here the first observation of the banded bee Amegilla mucorea in Morocco.



Banded bees are solitary with a relatively short flying period of approximately 6 weeks. They usually have just one generation per year, but depending on the species and the climatic conditions, two or more generations can be produced. They spend most  of the year in prepupal stage in their cocoons. Most of them dig their nest in dry soil of different substrate, from clay to soft sandstone, some even excavate burrows in old mortar or mud bricks. They are mostly encountered in dry areas, from semi-arid regions to deserts. They mainly visit flowers with long corollae like borage plants (borage, comfrey), aromatic plants (mint, sage or basil) and legumes (faba bean, Alfalfa, clover). They are also able to do buzz pollination (rapid vibration of the flight muscles, causing the flower to vibrate and release pollen), which makes them important pollinators of solanaceous crops, such as tomato, eggplant and pepper.
 
It is difficult to catch banded bees with a sweep net because they fly very fast. Also, they almost never fall into pan traps. For these reasons, their abundance and distribution are often underestimated. Moreover, because of their shape and color homogeneity, the identification of the different species is quite complicate and we still don’t have a clear understanding of their taxonomy.
 
In July 2019, we recorded the banded bee Amegilla mucorea for the first time in Morocco, in an oasis area in the vicinity of Erfoud. The specimen was collected while foraging on flowers of Alfalfa (Medicago sativa). The natural history of Amegilla mucorea is not well known, specimens are usually encountered in dry or desertic areas. This species is known from North Africa (Algeria, Lybia and Egypt) but also from Middle-East (Israel and Saudi Arabia) up to Pakistan (see map on Discover life).
 
If you want to know more about the taxonomy and ecology of banded bees, read the revisions of Friese (1897) (under the name Podalirius) and Brooks (1988) . There is no specific literature on the banded bees of Morocco, but papers of Priesner (1957) for Egypt and Herrero & Pérez-Iñigo (1982) for Iberian peninsula can help with species identification. Rasmont (2014) also provides a full checklist of all West-Palaearctic species including distributions and illustrations of the Moroccan species.
 

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Prof. Pierre Rasmont (University of Mons, Belgium) who collected, identified and photographed the specimen. 
This research was funded by the Federal German Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) through the International Climate Initiative (IKI).

Keywords

oasis alfalfa desert apidae anthophorini

Countries

About the author

Patrick Lhomme is Pollination Ecologist at International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas - ICARDA.