The species Melissoptila pinguis / Melissoptila otomita

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Melissoptila is a neotropical genus -- that is, native to subtropical and tropical regions of the New World.  The 52 Melissoptila species identified by Urban are found as far south as Argentinean Patagonia and Central Chile, and as far north as the Greater Antilles and the U.S. Rio Grande border.  Since Urban's 1998 study, new Melissoptila have been documented only in Latin America, Hispaniola and Cuba.

 

Melissoptila pinguis is the sole species of the genus Melissoptila found in the United States.  According to Michener, even this species is relatively rare in North America and, within the United States, appears principally in southernmost Texas.  Melissoptila pinguis also has been documented in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras.

 

Very little research on this unique species is widely available. The first published record of Melissoptila pinguis appeared in an 1878 article by entomologist Ezra Townsend Cresson titled “Descriptions of new species of North American bees.”  The article’s description of the species was based on Cresson’s inspection of a single male specimen he encountered while traveling in Mexico.

 

Cresson placed the male bee in the long-horned genus Melissodes, naming it Melissodes otomita.  He described the male bee as .35 inches long and black, with a head, thorax and legs clothed with mottled light and dark hairs; a pale yellow clypeus; and an abdomen whose second and third segments were covered with appressed (short and dense) golden-brown hairs. The bee’s tegulae (the plates where the wings meet the bee’s body) were black, and its wings were glassy with dusky outer margins.  A notable feature of the male bee was that the sixth segment of the bee’s abdomen had a blunt tooth on each side.

 

​Earlier in the same article, Cresson described a female bee, which he assigned to a separate species and named Melissodes pinguis.  Like the male Melissodes otomita, the female bee measured .35 inches, and had short, dense golden-brown hairs on some segments of her abdomen; dark tegulae; and wings that were glassy with dusky tips.  The veins on the female bee’s wings also resembled those of Cresson's male Melissodes otomita.  (These traits are shown in the accompanying photographs.)  With time, Melissodes otomita and M. pinguis would turn out to be the same species.

 

Cresson’s precise descriptions, now more than 140 years old, have proven impressively accurate:  they describe to a tee the male and female Melissodes pinguis shown on this guide page.

 

After Cresson’s seminal article, Melissodes pinguis/otomita continued to find its way sporadically into the annals of entomological literature.  In 1897, nearly twenty years after Cresson's publication, entomologist T. D. A. Cockerell included Melissodes pinguis/otomita in an article he titled “New and little-known bees.”  He described both male and female specimens, placing both under the label “Melissodes pinguis.”  Cockerell also filled out Cresson’s description of the female Melissodes pinguis, noting, among other attributes, that its abdominal hair was “like velvet”.  Two years later, he included Melissodes pinguis in a catalog of the bees of Mexico.

 

Sixty years later, in 1957, entomologist Wallace E. LaBerge published a study of New World long-horned bees titled “The genera of bees of the tribe Eucerini in North and Central America”.  In this study, he placed Melissodes otomita/pinguis in the genus Melissoptila and affirmed that Melissoptila otomita and Melissoptila pinguis belonged to a single species.  LaBerge commented, in addition, that the male bee had toothlike projections on both its sixth and seventh abdominal segments. LaBerge discerned the same toothlike projections on the sixth segment of the female bee.

 

In her 1968 comprehensive description of the genus Melissoptila, Danuncia Urban linked Cresson’s two descriptions under one name, Melissoptila pinguis.  (Since Cresson had described the female bee first, under entomological rules of naming, the pinguis technically trumps otomita.)  This species nonetheles often appears  in popular English-language databases and guides as Melissoptila otomita.