Padrões morfológicos na venação alar de espécies de Tetragona Lepeletier & Serville, 1828 do grupo clavipes (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini)

Abstract

Tetragona Lepeletier & Serville, 1828 (Hymenoptera: Apidae) is a genus of stingless bees widely distributed in Brazil. It has 15 species distributed in the Neotropics, from Mexico to Uruguay, nine of which are found in Brazil. However, Tetragona elongata (Lepeletier & Serville, 1828), a species known only from the Southeast region and which had been synonymized with Tetragona clavipes (Fabricius, 1804), was revalidated without any justification. The aim of this study was to test whether the morphometrics analysis of the wings is efficient in the diagnosis of the species of this genus, in addition to testing the validity of the revalidation mentioned above. This technique was applied by accessing the right forewings of 660 workers of T. clavipes, T. elongata e T. quadrangula (Lepeletier, 1836), from five Brazilian collections. For the geometric morphometric analysis, 12 landmarks were selected. The software MorphoJ version 1.6 was used to do Discriminant Function analysis (1000 replications) and Canonical Variation Analysis (CVA). Between T. clavipes and T. elongata, there was a 100% variance between species (canonical variation analysis), suggesting that it may be an indication of speciation. Even though T. elongata has been revalidated, it still has overlapped with T. clavipes, which indicates to be the same species. Taxonomic studies are needed to synonymize them.

Can the shape of the wing help in the identification of African stingless bee species? (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini)

“…Moreover, among solitary bees, to assess changes in wing shape and size in widely distributed solitary bees (Dellicour et al 2017) and in European honeybees, to monitor their health (Vanderplanck et al 2021). Furthermore, GM have also been applied to refine the taxonomy of five genera of Neotropical honey and stingless bees (Bueno et al 2009;Francisco et al 2008;Francoy et al , 2011Francoy et al , 2012Francoy et al , 2016Nogueira et al 2019;Santos et al 2021Santos et al , 2022. Although extensive studies have been conducted in Neotropical stingless bees, the endemic Afrotropical stingless bees are poorly known and only few taxonomic studies, using body morphology, nest architecture, DNA barcoding and classical morphometrics have been done to describe 21 species (Combey et al 2013;Eardley 2004;Ndungu et al 2017Ndungu et al , 2019Portugal-Araujo and Kerr 1959;Rasmussen and Cameron 2010).…”