Updates to the checklist of the wild bee fauna of Luxembourg as inferred from revised natural history collection data and fieldwork

Abstract

Museums and other institutions curating natural history collections (NHCs) are fundamental entities to many scientific disciplines, as they house data and reference material for varied research projects. As such, biological specimens preserved in NHCs represent accessible physical records of the living world's history. They provide useful information regarding the presence and distribution of different taxonomic groups through space and time. Despite the importance of biological museum specimens, their potential to answer scientific questions, pertinent to the necessities of our current historical context, is often under-explored. The currently-known wild bee fauna of Luxembourg comprises 341 registered species distributed amongst 38 different genera. However, specimens stored in the archives of local NHCs represent an untapped resource to update taxonomic lists, including potentially overlooked findings relevant to the development of national conservation strategies. We re-investigated the wild bee collection of the Zoology Department of the National Museum of Natural History Luxembourg by using morphotaxonomy and DNA barcoding. The collection revision led to the discovery of four species so far not described for the country: Andrena lagopus (Latreille, 1809), Nomada furva (Panzer, 1798), Hoplitis papaveris (Latreille, 1799) and Sphecodes majalis (Pérez, 1903). Additionally, the presence of Nomada sexfasciata (Panzer, 1799), which inexplicably had been omitted by the most current species list, can be re-confirmed. Altogether, our findings increase the number of recorded wild bee species in Luxembourg to 346. Moreover, the results highlight the crucial role of NHCs as repositories of our knowledge of the natural world.

A metabarcoding framework for wild bee assessment in Luxembourg

“…Early metabarcoding data already indicate a potential benefit of this approach for assessing Central European wild bees (Gueuning et al 2019, for Switzerland), but its methodological performance has yet to be evaluated for the regional fauna and for different primer pairs separately. By 2021, 349 wild bee species had been described as present in Luxembourg (Cantú-Salazar et al 2021;Herrera-Mesías and Weigand 2021), a number that is expected to increase over the next years as a result of increased sampling efforts to develop pollinator monitoring programs. Compared to adjacent countries, this amount is similar to the number of species registered in Belgium (398 species) and The Netherlands (366 species), about one third of the species described from France (949 species) and more than half of the species of Germany (over 550 species) (Westrich et al 2011;Rasmont et al 2017;Schneider 2018;Vereecken 2018).…”