Megachile (Chalicodoma) baetica (Gerstaecker, 1869)

Risch, Stephan, Roberts, Stuart P. M., Smit, Jan, Wood, Thomas J., Michez, Denis & Reverté, Sara, 2023, The new annotated checklist of the wild bees of Europe (Hymenoptera: Anthophila), Zootaxa 5327 (1), pp. 1-147 : 64

Megachile (Chalicodoma) baetica (Gerstaecker, 1869)

This taxon has often been considered as a subspecies or a “form” of the widely distributed Megachile parietina (Geoffroy, 1785) . Megachile baetica differs from the latter in the colour of the vestiture in the female sex (predominantly brown in M. baetica , black in M. parietina ). Megachile baetica is mostly found on the Iberian Peninsula, although it reaches the south-eastern part of France. Benoist (1940) noted that no sculptural character separates the two taxa, and that the populations in south-eastern France are intermediate, leading him to treat M. baetica as an infraspecific “form” of M. parietina . By contrast, Ortiz-Saìnchez et al. (2012) report both taxa from the Iberian Peninsula, each with a distinct geographic distribution pattern: M. baetica is present at low elevations in various locations in Spain and Portugal, while M. parietina is mostly found at high elevations in the Sierra Nevada. This pattern suggests that the range of both taxa overlap and that each shows a distinct climatic niche, supporting their recognition as valid taxa. Future work is needed to settle the status of M. baetica (Praz et al., in prep.), and we treat both species as valid for now.