Michener, C. D.
2007, 992 pages
Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. Baltimore, MD
0-8018-8573-6 
Price $180.00 (hard)

Scarcely seven years after Charles Michener published his first edition of The Bees of the World (2000) to great acclaim, garnering 5-star reviews in top scientific journals including Nature and Science and an R. R. Hawkins Award from the American Association of Publishers for the top scholarly reference work of the year, a second edition (2007) is on the shelves. In the first masterwork, Michener guaranteed that a single reference would contain all essential knowledge of bees (Apiformes), much of it accumulated over nearly seven decades of his own collected work and that of generations of bee students trained directly or indirectly under his tutelage at the University of Kansas. Within 913 pages, he summarized the existing knowledge of bee taxonomy, phylogeny, and classification, along with chapters that briefly summarized fossil bees, historical biogeography, nesting biology, floral relationships, and ideas about social evolution.

That only seven years have passed since the first edition is testament to the vigorous ongoing research on bees. The new edition is as beautifully produced as the first, contains all of the many original chapters (several slightly re-titled) and an additional 40 pages that include color plates of fossil bees and updates on new genera, subgenera, and species, summarized in an updated Table 16-1 in Chapter 16. There are 278 new references added to the literature citations. These updates exemplify how taxonomy is always changing, as it should in an active field, with the number of recognized genera increasing from 425 to 443 and the total described species increasing by 1,200 from 16,325 to 17,533. At this rate, everything else holding constant, it will take only 1,600 years for bees to catch up with the beetles!

The majority of the 121 chapters comprise keys to subfamilies, genera, and subgenera of each of the seven families, including valuable discussions of the biology and anatomy of each group. For experts interested in one or more of the seven families comprising Apiformes, look for revisionary changes in the Colletidae, including the addition of three new tribes in the Colletinae and loss (due to synonymy) of two tribes in Xeromelissinae. Andrenidae, particularly the subfamily Andreninae, has increased significantly (20%) with the addition of ~300 species. Of the two subfamilies of Halictidae, Halictinae has undergone considerable revision within the genus Halictus, with the construction of three new subgenera and a reduction from 88 to 36 recognized species in the subgenus Seladonia.

Through no fault of the author, it is unfortunate that at the time the new edition was being reworked, some comprehensive family level and tribal phylogenies were under construction. As a result, the higher classification of bees shown in Michener’s Table 16-1 does not represent the current knowledge. For instance, a recently inferred phylogeny of bee families by Danforth et al. (2006) strongly supports the hypothesis that Melittidae comprises a paraphyletic basal assemblage of three lineages. The Danforth et al. phylogeny is included in Chap. 20 of the new edition (Family Level Phylogeny and the Proto-Bee) but Melittidae is nevertheless treated as a single family in his higher classification of bees. Among the corbiculate Apidae, a comprehensive molecular phylogeny of the tribe Bombini (genus Bombus) was published recently (Cameron et al. 2007) and from this, the classification of bumble bees was simplified (Williams et al. 2008) to recognize only 15 of the original 38 subgenera listed by Michener in Table 16-1. Narrowly missing inclusion of this simplified classification in the 2nd edition is somewhat of an irony because of all the taxa Michener considered grossly over-divided, it was the bumble bees. A molecular analysis of the corbiculate tribe Meliponini (stingless bees) was also published recently (Rasmussen and Cameron 2007; Michener cites this in an Addenda). This study and subsequent work revealed that the large genus Trigona is not monophyletic but instead comprises a polyphyletic group of two distantly related clades in the Old and New Worlds. As currently classified in Michener, however, Trigona is retained as a single broadly distributed genus. Ongoing phylogenetic research on all the families will undoubtedly lead to other significant changes in our understanding of bee relationships and evolution.

Another finding that narrowly missed the 2nd edition, although it made it into the Addenda, is the discovery of the exciting new Cretaceous age fossil, Melittosphex burmensis (Poinar and Danforth 2006), which links bees directly to the apoid wasps. Melittosphex burmensis (~100 mya) has characters of both bees and apoid wasps, but is considered an extinct bee or beelike lineage more closely related to the extant bees than is Crabronidae, considered up to that time the sister group (Poinar and Danforth 2006). The fossil therefore lends strong support to phylogenetic hypotheses that indicate bees arose as a monophyletic group from within the apoid wasps sometime during the mid-Cretaceous.

If one has the first edition, it will be an economic decision as to whether the new edition is worth the purchase. Libraries should definitely obtain an updated version. For those melittologists and pollination ecologists that do not have a copy, this new edition is a must-have. However, be warned that this is not a book that will assist the urban gardener to identify a bee to species from a photograph (one citizen scientist who purchased the book was unhappy about this) — the mass alone would discourage all but a weightlifter from hefting this volume around in the field. Please check your local field guides and state keys for species identification. The availability of such local references is crucial at a time when some of our local pollinators are disappearing or undergoing severe range reductions. Encouraging people to learn their local wild bee fauna (and flora) will help foster their survival and reproduction. In this regard, The Bees of the World plays an important role in educating individuals about the number and diversity of bees on this planet, distilling the knowledge of their biology and biodiversity into a single unified work. This alone is a great tribute to the author, who has spent most of a lifetime devoted to unveiling the mysteries of these flower-tending creatures.

References
Cameron, S.A., H. M. Hines, and P. H. Williams. 2007. A comprehensive phylogeny of the bumble bees (Bombus). Biol. J. Linn. Soc. 91: 161-188.

Danforth, B. N., S. Sipes, J. Fang, and S. G. Brady. 2006. The history of early bee diversification based on five genes plus morphology. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 103: 15118-15123.

Poinar, G. O. Jr. and B. N. Danforth. 2006. A Fossil Bee from Early Cretaceous Burmese Amber. Science 314: 614.

Rasmussen, C. and S. A. Cameron. 2007. A molecular phylogeny of the Old World stingless bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini) supports non-monophyly of the large genus Trigona. System. Entomol. 32: 26-39.

Williams, P. H., S. A. Cameron, H. M. Hines, B. Cederberg, and P. Rasmont. 2008. A simplified subgeneric classification of the bumblebees (genus Bombus). Apidologie 39: 46-74.

Sydney A. Cameron and
Claus Rasmussen
Department of Entomology
University of Illinois Urbana, IL 61801 USA
scameron@life.uiuc.edu
American Entomologist
Vol. 55, No. 3, Summer 2009