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Bee; Biodiversity; Hymenoptera; Apidae; Andrenidae; Halictidae ; Occurrence; Specimen

The native bee fauna of Mississippi, USA has been historically poorly sampled, but is of particular relevance to determine range limits for species that occur in the southern United States. Additions to the list of native bees known for Mississippi are reported with notes on range, ecology, and resources for identification.

Hymenoptera: Apoidea

The native bee fauna of Mississippi is poorly known and sampled, but is of particular relevance to determining range limits of many species (Smith et al. 2012). Mississippi is composed of four distinct ecoregions: the Southeastern Plains, the Mississippi Alluvial Plain, the Mississippi Valley Loess Plains, and the Southern Coastal Plain (Chapman et al. 2004). The majority of the recorded bee species currently known from Mississippi are from Mitchell, who summarized state level distributions across the eastern United States, and recorded 122 species from Mississippi (Mitchell 1960, Mitchell 1962). The majority of the records included therein are those from collections made by Michener in the 1940s near Hattiesburg, MS, in the Southeastern Plains (Michener 1947). Smith et al. (2012) listed 53 more records from the Black Belt Prairies, also part of the Southeastern Plains, while Rightmyer (2008) listed an additional five species in a revisionary study of the cleptoparasite Triepeolus Robertson. An additional series of papers (MacGown and Scheifer 1992, Cane et al. 1996, Colla et al. 2011, Parys et al. 2015) each added singular records, bringing the published total number of species reported from the state of Mississippi to 184. Of the four ecoregions that occur within the state, the Mississippi Alluvial Plain is of particular interest as it is almost completely un-sampled for native bee fauna with the exception of Parys et al. (2015), and is part of the Mississippi Alluvial Valley (MAV) which also includes portions of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri. This region of Mississippi is colloquially referred to as the "Delta" of the state. The MAV is the largest floodplain in the United States, comprising over 10 million hectares of historically bottomland hardwood forest that was seasonally flooded (Frederickson 2005). Today, the majority of the floodplain has been controlled with a system of levees constructed during the twentieth century, allowing the majority of the landscape to be converted to commercial agriculture (Faulkner et al. 2011). Landscapes fragmented by agriculture generally have less biodiversity than those left as natural habitats, though mass flowering crops can influence the densities of generalist pollinators (Westphal et al. 2003, Potts et al. 2010). Baseline data on the presence and distribution of native bee species of these previously unsampled areas across the MAV can inform decision making by land managers, and potentially be used to assess risks from agricultural practices.

The personnel involved in the project:

Collection methods at all of the locations included multiple methods from the following: modified pan traps (blue, yellow, and white "bee bowls"), blue and yellow vane traps, malaise traps, netting, sweeping, and examining bycatch from other collection methods.

Method step description:

1. n/a