Evolution of andrenine bees reveals a long and complex history of faunal interchanges through the Americas during the Mesozoic and Cenozoic

Abstract

Bees are presumed to have arisen in the early to mid-Cretaceous coincident with the fragmentation of the southern continents and concurrently with the early diversification of the flowering plants. Here, we apply DNA sequences from multiple genes to recover a dated phylogeny and historical biogeographic of andrenine bees, a large group of 3000 species mainly distributed in arid areas of North America, South America, and the Palearctic region. Our results corroborate the monophyly of Andreninae and points toward a South America origin for the group during the Late Cretaceous. Overall, we provide strong evidence of amphitropical distributional pattern currently observed in the American continent as result of faunal interchange in at least three historical periods, much prior to the Panama Isthmus closure. The Palearctic diversity is shown to have arisen from North America during the Eocene and Miocene, and the Afrotropical lineages likely originated from the Palearctic region in the Miocene when the Sahara Desert was mostly vegetated. The incursions from South to North America and then onto the Old World are chronological congruent with periods when open-vegetation habitats were available for trans-continental dispersal and at the times when aridification and temperature decline offered favorable circumstances for bee diversification.