68. Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862

Fig. 66

Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862: 60, ♂.

Type material examined

Holotype

INDONESIA • ♂; Ter. [Ternate]; [probably between 8 Jan. 1858 – 1 May 1859]; OUMNH, ENT-HYME2822.

Type locality

Ternate.

Notes

Baker (1993: 223) wrote the following:

“A ♂ in the UMO type collection, labelled ‘Ter.’ [white disc] and ‘ Megachile laboriosa Smith’ [Smith], is the HOLOTYPE of this species and it has now been labelled accordingly. The type is intact but for the loss of the R antenna and the apical segments of tarsus L I.

C. laboriosum belongs to a small group of medium-sized, strikingly coloured Chalicodoma centred on New Guinea. The group includes nidulator (Smith, 1865), tertium (Dalla Torre, 1896) [ = senex Smith, 1865, nec Smith, 1853, nec Smith 1862, = albiceps (Friese, 1903)], pretiosum (Friese, 1909), hertlei (Friese, 1911) [= regina (Cheesman, 1938) nec (Friese, 1903)] and luteiceps (Friese, 1911) [= malayanum var. auriceps (Meade-Waldo, 1914)]. To what extent these and their relatives may represent colour-forms of a smaller number of species is uncertain: ♂♂ of most have not been collected, or, at least, are not present in Berlin, Leiden, London, Oxford, Paris or Wien.

Chalicodoma tertium is very perfectly mimicked by Megachile (Callochile) lorentzi Friese, 1911 . Similar mimicry groups among strikingly patterned megachilines are more familiar in the Ethiopian fauna, where they may involve more than one subgenus each of Chalicodoma and Megachile, sometimes also Creightonella (which, on biological and structural grounds, is the more primitive of the three). Study of one such group suggests that a Megachile (Amegachile) species is the model for mimics in two subgenera of Chalicodoma, ( Callomegachile) and ( Pseudomegachile)”.

For the collecting date, Wallace visited the island of Ternate at least five times in 1858–1859, between 8 Jan.–1 Feb. 1858; 1–25 Mar. 1858; 15 Aug.–14 Sep. 1858; 2–9 Oct. 1858; and 20 Apr.–1 May 1859 (Wallace 1869). Importantly, he sent a letter from Ternate between 2–9 March 1858 to Charles Darwin (the famous “ Ternate manuscript” concerning what became the theory of evolution) (Smith 2014). It is impossible to pin down when exactly this specimen was collected over this period.

Current status

Megachile (Callomegachile) laboriosa Smith, 1862 (Ascher & Pickering 2024).

Distribution

Indonesia (North Maluku: Ternate) (Smith 1862; Ascher & Pickering 2024).