A supermatrix phylogeny of the world’s bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila)

The increasing availability of large molecular phylogenies has provided
new opportunities to study the evolution of species traits, their origins
and diversification, and biogeography; yet there are limited attempts to
synthesise existing phylogenetic information for major insect groups. Bees
(Hymenoptera: Anthophila) are a large group of insect pollinators that
have a worldwide distribution, and a wide variation in ecology,
morphology, and life-history traits, including sociality. For these
reasons, as well as their major economic importance as pollinators,
numerous molecular phylogenetic studies of family and genus-level
relationships have been published, providing an opportunity to assemble a
bee ‘tree-of-life’. We used publicly available genetic sequence data,
including phylogenomic data, reconciled to a taxonomic database, to
produce a concatenated supermatrix phylogeny for the Anthophila comprising
4,586 bee species, representing 23% of species and 82% of genera. At
family, subfamily, and tribe levels, support for expected relationships
was robust, but between and within some genera, relationships remain
uncertain. Within families, sampling of genera ranged from 67–100% but
species coverage was lower (17–41%). Our phylogeny mostly reproduces the
relationships found in recent phylogenomic studies with a few exceptions.
We provide a summary of these differences and the current state of
molecular data available and its gaps. We discuss the advantages and
limitations of this bee supermatrix phylogeny (available online at
beetreeoflife.org), which may enable new insights into long-standing
questions about evolutionary drivers in bees, and potentially insects more
generally.