High-throughput monitoring of wild bee diversity and abundance via mitogenomics

The 48 mitogenome assemblies and metadata for the individual bee libraries and the bulk-sample libraries have have been deposited in the Dryad depository: http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.r7122. Project summary: Wild bees collectively play a keystone role in the pollination of wild plants and cultivated crops and thereby help to maintain biodiversity and increase food production. Evidence of declines in wild pollinators and insect-pollinated plants requires high-throughput methods to monitor bee abundance and diversity, since the number of wild bee species ranges from hundreds to thousands per country. Morphology-based identification and PCR-based metabarcoding are inefficient because taxonomic expertise is scarce, and the Hymenoptera are recalcitrant to PCR. We have developed a metagenomic approach to identify bee species from bulk samples, and to monitor wild bee diversity and abundance.