One in three bee species on Colombia's first national checklist is a new country record

The 246 are country records, meaning species documented in Colombia for the first time ^[3]. Subtract them and 492 species on the list were already known from the country ^[14]. That falls inside the 466-to-604 range of the earlier tallies ^[4].

The bee result stands out because Colombia has more species of birds, orchids, palms, freshwater fish and butterflies than any other country ^[6]. Bees usually run the other way, with the tropics generally holding fewer species than subtropical areas ^[7]. López-Uribe argues that this pattern may be partly driven by large gaps in tropical data ^[8]. "Bees are among the most important pollinators in both natural and agricultural ecosystems, but their patterns of diversity vary significantly between temperate regions, where they have been studied the most, and tropical regions, where we did our study," López-Uribe said ^[9].

The team's own estimate puts Colombia's true total closer to 1,400 species ^[17]. On that figure the checklist holds about 53% of the fauna, and some 662 species are still unrecorded or undescribed ^[18]. The press account puts the missing share at "about 25%" ^[17]. Those two numbers cannot both hold against the same total.

Whichever is right, the gap is wide. It supports the first half of López-Uribe's argument: a tropical bee count this incomplete says little about how many species actually live there. The second half, that a fully sampled tropics would close the gap with the subtropics, needs subtropical counts made with comparable effort, and the account reports none. I think the checklist makes the low tropical counts hard to rely on, but it does not yet overturn them.

The thing this doesn't tell you is how stable the lifestyle shares are. The social and above-ground nesting proportions describe the species recorded so far ^[10]. If the missing species lean toward solitary, ground-nesting bees, the social share will fall as the list grows. The Andean peak in diversity ^[11] depends in the same way on where collectors have looked, and the paper's title says it identifies areas with major data deficiencies ^[13].

Much of the list was assembled from existing specimens. "Insect collections are invaluable archives of biodiversity," Martín-Rojas said. "For this study, local collections contributed 70% of the records reported in the checklist." ^[12]