Meganomiinae

Meganomiinae
Meganomia gigas
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Arthropoda
Class:	Insecta
Order:	Hymenoptera
Clade:	Anthophila
Family:	Melittidae
Subfamily:	Meganomiinae
Subfamilies
Ceratomonia Meganomia Pseudophilanthus Uromonia

Meganomiinae is a subfamily of melittid bees, with 10 species in four genera, found only in Africa, primarily in xeric habitats, with the distributional limits in Yemen and Madagascar.^[1] They are rather different in appearance from the other groups of past/present melittids, being large bees (10–22 mm), mostly black with strong yellow markings, resembling anthidiine megachilids.^[1]

Taxonomy

Initial molecular work suggested that the family Melittidae was paraphyletic, and that it's subfamilies (including Meganomiinae) should therefore be elevated to family status.^[2][3] However, these studies included very few melittids, due to their rarity. A 2013 investigation included a greater number of melittid bees and concluded that the family was probably monophyletic, thus supporting Meganomiinae as a subfamily of Melittidae.^[4]

References

1. Michez, Denis (2008). "Monographic revision of the melittid bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea, Melittidae sensu lato)" (PDF). Proceedings of the Netherlands Entomological Society meeting 19: 32.
2. Danforth, B.N., Sipes, S., Fang, J., Brady, S.G. (2006). "The history of early bee diversification based on five genes plus morphology". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103: 15118–15123. doi:10.1073/pnas.0604033103. PMC 1586180. PMID 17015826.
3. Danforth, Bryan. "Bees-a primer" (PDF). Current Biology 17 (5): 156–161. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.01.025.
4. Hedtke, Shannon H. (2013). "The bee tree of life: a supermatrix approach to apoid phylogeny and biogeography". BMC Evolutionary Biology 13 (138): 1–13.