Bombini
Tribe of bees
The Bombini are a tribe of large bristly apid bees which feed on pollen or nectar. Many species are social, forming nests of up to a few hundred individuals; other species, formerly classified as Psithyrus cuckoo bees, are brood parasites of nest-making species. The tribe contains a single living genus, Bombus, the bumblebees, and some extinct genera such as Calyptapis and Oligobombus. The tribe was described by Pierre André Latreille in 1802.
01Fossils
Bombus cerdanyensis was described from Late Miocene lacustrine beds of La Cerdanya, Spain in 2014.
Calyptapis florissantensis was described by Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell in 1906 from the Chadronian (Eocene) lacustrine, large shale of Florissant in the US.
Oligobombus cuspidatus was described by Antropov et al (2014) from the Late Eocene Insect Bed of the Bembridge Marls on the Isle of Wight, England. The holotype fossil was described by re-examining a specimen in the Smith Collection.
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Bombini”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Images, from Wikimedia Commons:
- Bumblebee 05.JPG by Tony Wills, CC BY-SA 3.0
- Dehon et al 2019 Zookeys Fig1-A Oligobombus cuspidatus.jpg by Dehon et al 2019 & Antropov et al. (2014), CC BY 4.0
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