I am very excited about this. For a couple of years now I have been looking for a bee checklist for the state IL US, but I couldn’t find one, I would hear numbers thrown around in the range from 300 to 500 but no one seemed to have a list. Well at last, published in the Journal of Kansas Entomological Society a checklist has been compiled with 491 confirmed species and another 51 unconfirmed. As an added bonus it includes the county lists. I realize that this might be a bit too fine tuned for a lot people (especially outside the US), but for people who live in IL or one of the surrounding states this could be an incredibly useful tool.
If you click the link it goes to the page to purchase the article ($10.00).
By the way @brian_d I now know why you put all of the tags over three posts, limit ten.
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If this list is this important, did you import it into iNaturalist?
post script for people who are not so good in Geography:
IL=Illinois
https://www.inaturalist.org/places/illinois
and this place has no checklist for Bee’s
https://www.inaturalist.org/check_lists/333-Illinois-Check-List?q=&view=photo&taxon=47221&observed=any&threatened=any&establishment_means=any&occurrence_status=not_absent&rank=species&taxonomic_status=active
Forgive the ignorance, but what would importing the list do? I’m not familiar with that for this site. And if it is good to do, how would you do it?
At the right top ‘‘add batch’’
Great news! I’ll also add that New York will have a more complete checklist soon thanks to the Empire State Native Pollinator Survey, which concludes this year. I think we’ll get up to around 450 bee species in total.
450 species of bees, or 450 species in the target group which according to the project page extends beyond bees ?
Just curious as next door Ontario which has a pretty well researched and maintained provincial species list has fewer than 200 bees on it.
That’s from a larger geography, with equivalent habitat. Yes Ontario lacks the Atlantic coast, but that should be offset with the boreal and northern habitats in the province.
Just bees! That would be a revision up from the last estimate (416 species as of 2015, as you can see from @brian_d’s link), but comparable to other states in the Northeast/Midwest US. I’m actually surprised there would be such a difference compared to Ontario though. Do you have a link to the provincial checklist? All I found after a cursory search was Packer, Genaro, and Sheffield 2007, which reports 409 species across Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, but I assume that well over half of these should be present in Ontario. In general (though based more off my intuition than actual numbers) I would expect that the majority of bee diversity in the province is around the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence, and that the Shield and regions further north probably add very few species that aren’t already found further south.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/get-natural-heritage-information
Even places like Wisconsin etc whose lists are linked to above report much higher numbers.
I wonder if that’s lack of exploration or just a side effect of living in a cooler climate?
Not sure either would be a big impact. The climate is not significantly different than New York, maybe colder by a bit than the seacoast without the moderating impact of the ocean. And certainly not different than MI, WI, MN etc it shares borders with or is close to.
I doubt there is a serious difference in study levels either.
neat!! if it gets uploaded I’d love to get an @. I have access to the article, but it would be a lot easier to compare to observations if it were already on inat :)
edit: oh, I suppose I can do it can’t I? ive never uploaded a list before. maybe ill start!
Another good way to explore records not on iNat is to toggle the GBIF records on the maps. In some cases, records end up on GBIF before they are published in the primary literature. A help file if you haven’t used this function before: https://vtatlasoflife.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/62000213950-viewing-gbif-through-inat
@beeboy ah thanks! ill look into that
ive now added the first 200 species to the list- @optilete it looks like you have to approve them before it will show up. ill add more later!
Ah, I think I see what happened. The insect entries in that database appear to be sorted alphabetically by family, though this is not immediately clear. So you may have just seen the bees in families Andrenidae and Apidae (of which the list includes 176), but with the addition of Colletidae, Halictidae, Megachilidae, and Melittidae, there are a total of 386 there.
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