Colletes

Colletes (plasterer bees or cellophane bees) is a large genus of smallish and hairy ground-nesting bees of the short-tongued bee family Colletidae. They have an almost worldwide distribution, but occur primarily in the Northern Hemisphere where they are found almost everywhere up to the edge of the Arctic ice. Plasterer bees were traditionally held to be a very ancient lineage; however, research in the early 2000s revealed their primitive traits to have been simply retained from ancestral bees. As of 2012 there were about 470 described species, and an estimated total around 700. They occur throughout the world except in Antarctica, Australia, Madagascar, and Southeast Asia. There are about 60 species in Europe and about 100 in North America north of Mexico. Due to their breeding habits, they require soils that are somewhat sandy and not too humid; the bulk of their diversity is found in temperate to subtropical Asia, in particular Central Asia. Since their relatives are found mainly in the Americas and Australia, the high diversity of Colletes in Asia is probably secondary and fairly recent, with the genus most likely originating in tropical America perhaps as much as 50 million years ago, and diversifying abundantly in the highly continental climate they found in interior Eurasia.

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