Bees are essential for ecosystem functioning, pollinating many wild and crop plant species. Predicting which species are most vulnerable to global changes, and how their loss may impact ecosystems and human well-being, is critical. Comprehensive information on bee response and effect traits is fundamental to these assessments. However, the Raunkiærian shortfall—insufficient trait data—remains significant for bees, particularly...

Centris ( Wagenknechtia ) is the only subgenus of centridine bees that occurs almost exclusively in the Andean Region. This study investigates the monophyly of C . ( Wagenknechtia ) proposing a hypothesis for the relationships among its species using 42 morphological characters of adults. The analysis resulted in one most parsimonious tree corroborating the monophyly of this group of oil‐collecting bees, with the relationships...

Oligolectic bees collect pollen from one or a few closely related species of plants, whereas polylectic bees visit a variety of flowers for pollen. Because of their more restricted range of host plants, it maybe expected that specialists exist in smaller, more isolated populations, with lower effective population sizes than generalists. Consequently, we hypothesized that oligolectic bees have reduced levels of genetic variatio...