Centris weilenmanni Friese, 1900

Vivallo, Felipe, 2020, Species of the bee genus Centris Fabricius, 1804 described by Heinrich Friese (Hymenoptera: Apidae), Zootaxa 4820 (2), pp. 231-259 : 256

Centris weilenmanni Friese, 1900

Centris weilenmanni Friese, 1900: 117 .

Type data: Friese (1900) proposed this species based on a single female collected by the Swiss mountaineer and writer Johann Jakob Weilenmann (1819‒1896). As a textile merchant, Weilenmann traveled to New York and then to Pernambuco, northeastern Brazil. During his stay in that country, Weilenmann created an extensive collection of insects, which he would later donate to the Zurich Polytechnic ( Anonymous, 2018). Between the samples collected there was the specimen used by Friese to describe this species. The holotype is housed at ZMB and it has the following data label: Pernambuc. Weilenmann [printed]\ Centris weilenmanni Fr. ♀ [handwritten] 1910 Friese det. [printed]\ [red label] Type [printed]\ Zool. Mus. Berlin [printed] ( ZMB).

Type locality: Brazil: Pernambuco state .

Comment: This is the rarest species of Centris described by Friese. Centris weilenmanni is only known from the type specimen which is very similar to C. carolae Snelling, 1966 , a species distributed from Costa Rica to Mexico ( Moure et al. 2007). This latter species is relatively infrequent to be found in collections, and the females of both species differ almost exclusively in details of the coloration and pubescence. On the other hand, Pernambuco state, as well as most of the neighboring states (Paraíba (north), Ceará (northwest), Alagoas (southwest), Bahia (south), and Piauí (west)) have been received numerous collecting activities for several decades, but a single specimen of this species has never been collected.A possibility could be that the holotype was mislabeled and it was actually collected in Central America. In this case C. carolae should be proposed as junior synonym of C. weilenmanii and the differences between them could be only variation. Unfortunately, nothing is known about the variation of coloration and pubescence of C. carolae .