Paul Hugh Williams

Natural History Museum, London · Department of Life Sciences

Bumblebee colour patterns can be highly variable within species, but are often closely similar among species. The present study takes a quantitative approach to survey bumblebee colour patterns in order to address some of the most basic questions concerning resemblances: (1) do colour-pattern groups exist; (2) are species within colour-pattern grou...

We review evidence from around the world for bumblebee declines and review management to mitigate threats. We find that there is evidence that some bumblebee species are declining in Europe, North America, and Asia. People believe that land-use changes may be having a negative effect through reductions in food plants in many parts of the world, but...

Many claims that uplift of the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau (QTP) drove the divergences of extant high-elevation biota have recently been challenged. For Mendacibombus bumblebees, high-elevation specialists with distributions centred on the QTP, we examine broader explanations. We extend integrative biogeography to cover multiple contributing factors by...

Species are often presumed to be apparent in nature, but in practice they may be difficult to recognise, especially when viewed across continents rather than within a single site. Coalescent-based Poisson-tree-process (PTP) models applied to fast-evolving genes promise one quantitative criterion for recognising species, complete with the estimates...

This is the first bumblebee ID guide to cover the entire Himalayan region from the far west of Pakistan, through India, Nepal, and Bhutan, to the far east of Arunachal Pradesh. The guide is based on more than 40 years of research and draws on the latest genetic and taxonomic results on Asian bumblebees to set out an extensively revised current und...

COI-barcode-like sequences appear to show substantially more species diversity among Mesoamerican bumblebees than had been reported previously from morphological studies. Closer examination shows that some of this apparent diversity may be pseudospecies (groups falsely misinterpreted as separate species), often supported by paralogous ‘numts’ (nucl...

A new species of bumble bee-mimicking brood parasitic bee, Tetralonioidella mimetica Orr & Zhu, sp. nov., is described from China. The systematic placement of this species was initially challenging but was resolved using a combination of phylogenomic and COI barcode analyses, which strongly support the new species as a member of the genus Tetraloni...

Bumblebees are ecologically and economically important pollinating insects, so their declines resulting from environmental changes have received intensive attention. Understanding how environmental factors shape the genetic differentiation of natural populations and identifying the genetic basis of local adaptation will provide insights into how sp...

Bumblebees are important pollinators for many natural and agricultural systems in temperate regions. Interspecific and intraspecific variation in floral resource preferences have been proposed to influence bumblebee community structure. In particular, sexual dimorphism is a major source of intraspecific niche variation. Although interspecific resou...

Understanding the influence of factors responsible for shaping community assemblage is crucial for biodiversity management and conservation. Gansu is one of the richest regions for bumblebee species in the world. We explored the distribution data of 52 bumblebee species collected in Gansu and its surroundings between 2002 and 2022, predicting habit...

Müllerian mimicry was proposed to be an example of a coevolved mutualism promoted by population isolation in glacial refugia. This, however, has not been well supported in butterfly models. Here, we use genomic data to test this theory while examining the population genetics behind mimetic diversification in a pair of co-mimetic bumble bees, Bombus...

Annual report on activities of the regional groups of the IUCN Bumblebee Sub Group of the Wild Bee Specialist Group for 2023

The mountain bumblebees of the subgenus Alpigenobombus Skorikov, 1914, are uniquely distinctive because the females have enlarged mandibles with six large, evenly spaced teeth, which they use to bite holes in long-corolla flowers for nectar robbing. Recognition of species in this subgenus has been uncertain, with names used in various combinations....

Bumblebees (Bombus Latreille, 1802), because of their large body size, bright colours and activity at times and places that coincide with biologists, are an example of a group of insects that is particularly well represented in museum collections. This is important if taxonomic revisions are to achieve greater comparability among species. Bumblebee...

The challenges of bee research in Asia are unique and severe, reflecting different cultures, landscapes, and faunas. Strategies and frameworks developed in North America or Europe may not prove applicable. Virtually none of these species have been assessed by the IUCN and there is a paucity of public data on even the basics of bee distribution. If...

Bombus flavescens Smith is one of the most widespread bumblebee species in the Oriental region. Due to colour polymorphisms, this species or species-complex has been a challenge for taxonomy. This study aims to assess the taxonomic status of the flavescens-complex using evidence from COI barcodes and morphology. We then reconstruct its biogeographi...

Bumblebees are one of the natural resources in the region that attracts nature lovers for their beautiful colour patterns as well as for their pollination behaviour. Therefore, to study the possibility of including bumblebees as a part of sustainable ecotourism, quantitative assessment of the bumblebees in Arunachal Pradesh was conducted. We monito...

The BBSG exists to foster the conservation of bumblebees and their habitats around the world especially through the IUCN Red-Listing process. In this ninth report of the BBSG’s activities, 2022 has been another unusual year as the pandemic has continued to interfere with field work for some people. But despite the difficulties, there has been progr...

Species are fundamental biological units, but their discovery and delimitation requires appropriate data and methods. To better circumscribe species, we must improve our species concepts and bolster the underlying data resources necessary to enact them. Here, we provide six prescriptions for better collecting and synergizing our knowledge on specie...

Species are fundamental biological units, but their discovery and delimitation requires appropriate data and methods. To better circumscribe species, we must improve our species concepts and bolster the underlying data resources necessary to enact them. Here, we provide six prescriptions for better collecting and synergizing our knowledge on specie...

The hypnorum-complex of bumblebees (in the genus Bombus Latreille, 1802) has been interpreted as consisting of a single widespread Old-World species, Bombus hypnorum (Linnaeus, 1758) s. lat., and its closely similar sister species in the New World, B. perplexus Cresson, 1863. We examined barcodes for evidence of species’ gene coalescents within thi...

This is an eletter to comment on Ma's letter (Science 377, 6610).

Our grasp of biodiversity, and especially of cryptic species, is fine-tuned through revisionary taxonomy. If species exist in nature and can be discovered with available techniques, then revisions should converge on broadly shared interpretations of species. Here species are recognised using integrative assessment, focussing on whether there is cor...

A problem for understanding bumblebee biogeography is that if bumblebees dispersed from Asia through North America to South America, if they are poor at long-distance dispersal with establishment over sea, and if the land bridge between North and South America was not established until c. 3Ma BP, then there is an apparent conflict with the divergen...

A detailed phylogeny of bumblebees is urgently needed to understand speciation and biogeographic diversification in the Neotropical region. We sequenced autosomal and mtDNA loci from nine Brazilian bumblebee species and compiled it with the data already available to obtain highly resolved phylogenetic trees with fossil-calibrated dates. The ancestr...

Splitting or lumping of species is a concern because of its potential confounding effect on comparisons of biodiversity and on conservation assessments. By comparing global lists of species reported by previous authors to lists of the presently recognized species that were known to those authors, a simple ratio can be used to describe their relativ...

Splitting or lumping of species is a concern because of its potential confounding effect on comparisons of biodiversity and on conservation assessments. By comparing global lists of species reported by previous authors to lists of the presently recognized species that were known to those authors, a simple ratio can be used to describe their relativ...

The managed bumblebee Bombus terrestris L. (Hymenoptera: Apidae) has become established on multiple continents and various islands globally, potentially impacting fauna and flora alike. Its introduction could prove especially problematic in Asia, where bumblebee biodiversity is the highest worldwide. Here, we report the active, unregulated commerci...

Annual report on activities of the regional groups of the IUCN Bumblebee Sub Group of the Wild Bee Specialist Group for 2021

It is well established that there are nine species of bumblebees indigenous to Taiwan, but what has been unclear is how many of them are endemic. We examine minimum divergence in COI barcodes and morphology between Taiwanese samples and some of the nearest mainland populations and compare the results with more detailed global coalescent analyses av...

The subgenus Bombus s. str. (of the genus Bombus Latreille) includes the bumblebee species of greatest commercial importance for pollination world-wide as well as some of the bumblebee species of greatest conservation concern. Species in this group have always proved especially difficult to recognise because they are weakly differentiated, not only...

The incorrect Associate Editor was listed. The correct Associate Editor is Fuwen Wei. This error has been corrected online.

Multisource approaches in taxonomy gather different lines of evidence in order to draw strongly supported taxonomic conclusions and constitute the basis of integrative taxonomy. In the case of overlooked taxa with disjunct distributions for which sampling is more challenging, integrative approaches help to propose stable hypotheses at the species a...

Annual report on activities of the regional groups of the IUCN Bumblebee Specialist Group for 2020

Bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: genus Bombus Latreille, 1802) constitute an important group of pollinators for many wild plants and crops in north temperate regions and South America. Although knowledge of these insects has been increasing over the last decades, some geographic areas remain poorly studied and additions to the knowledge of their fa...

Bumblebees are a diverse group of globally important pollinators in natural ecosystems and for agricultural food production. With both eusocial and solitary life-cycle phases, and some social parasite species, they are especially interesting models to understand social evolution, behavior, and ecology. Reports of many species in decline point to pa...

Measuring progress toward international biodiversity targets requires robust information on the conservation status of species, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species provides. However, data and capacity are lacking for most hyperdiverse groups, such as invertebrates, plants, and fungi, partic...

Bumblebees are a diverse group of globally important pollinators in natural ecosystems and for agricultural food production. With both eusocial and solitary life-cycle phases, and some social parasite species, they are especially interesting models to understand social evolution, behavior, and ecology. Reports of many species in decline point to pa...

This note confirms that specimens from the Orkney Islands described as B. terrestris in Prys-Jones and Williams (2015) were COI barcoded by Prof Robert Paxton in 2018 and confirmed to be B. terrestris; not B. cryptarum as stated in Else and Edwards 2018.

Annual report on activities of the regional groups of the IUCN Bumblebee Specialist Group for 2019

Since the beginning of taxonomy, species have been described based on morphology, but the advent of using semio-chemicals and genetics has led to the discovery of cryptic species (i.e. morphologically similar species). When a new cryptic species is described, earlier type specimens have to be re-evaluated, although this process can be challenging a...

ABSTRACT Efforts to inventory and monitor bee diversity would benefit from a map of zoogeographic divisions, which might be established independently through modelling the distribution of DNA-derived species proxies. We establish molecular operational taxonomic units (MOTU) for bees sequenced for two genes from climatically disparate sites througho...

The name malaisei (Skorikov, 1937) is a secondary junior homonym in the genus Bombus of the name malaisei Bischoff, 1930. The name burmensis nom. nov. is proposed as a replacement name for malaisei (Skorikov, 1937), of which it is an objective junior synonym, to avoid confusion of these taxa. http://www.zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:9F5F0037...

Bumble bees ( Bombus spp.) are a widespread corbiculate lineage (Apinae: Corbiculata: Bombini), mostly found among temperate and alpine ecosystems. Approximately 260 species have been recognized and grouped recently into a simplified system of 15 subgenera. Most of the species are nest-building and primitively eusocial. Species of Bombus have been...

The bumblebees of the subgenus Alpinobombus of the genus Bombus are unusual among bees for specialising in many of the most northerly vegetated arctic habitats on Earth. Most named taxa in this group (37 available names from a total of 67 names) were described originally from differences in the colour patterns of the hair. Previous revisions have s...

Arctic and alpine species are expected to be particularly vulnerable to climate change as they inhabit areas of extreme climates. To understand how such species may respond, we compared two groups of bumblebees that specialise in arctic (Alpinobombus) and alpine (Mendacibombus) biomes. These bumblebee species are all extreme cold specialists with s...

Bumblebees (tribe Bombini, genus Bombus Latreille) play a pivotal role as pollinators in mountain regions for both native plants and for agricultural systems. In our survey of northern Thailand, four species of bumblebees (Bombus (Megabombus) montivagus Smith, B. (Alpigenobombus) breviceps Smith, B. (Orientalibombus) haemorrhoidalis Smith and B. (M...

Bumble bees (Bombus spp.) are a widespread corbiculate lineage (Apinae: Corbiculata: Bombini), mostly found among temperate and alpine ecosystems. Approximately 260 species have been recognized and grouped recently into a simplified system of 15 subgenera. Most of the species are nest-building and primitively eusocial. Species of Bombus have been m...

One day symposium on Biological Refugia held at Natural History Museum London.

Alpine Bombus International Meeting 29th-31st July, 2018 Book of Abstracts

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) commits its 196 nation parties to conserve biological diversity, use its components sustainably, and share fairly and equitably the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources. The last of these objectives was further codified in the Convention's Nagoya Protocol (NP), which came into effect in 201...

Se presenta la información actual sobre los abejorros (Bombus) de México.

The BBSG exists to foster the conservation of bumblebees and their habitats around the world. In this sixth report of the BBSG’s activities, 2017 has been another busy year, with continuing progress towards our goal of evaluating the extinction risk of all ca 265 species of bumblebees worldwide using the IUCN Red List Criteria. Red List assessments...

The distinctive, large bumblebee Bombus tanguticus Morawitz was described from yellow-banded queens (females) collected from high elevations on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) by Nikolay Przhevalsky’s fourth Central Asia expedition. One of Morawitz’s syntype females is designated here as lectotype. Because of the distinctive female morphology, Pi...

Bombus terrestris and Bombus pratorum were found for the first time in the Azores in 2005. Until then Bombus ruderatus was the only bumblebee species known from this group of nine mid-Atlantic islands. The identity of B. terrestris was confirmed by DNA barcoding.

Conservation biology can profit greatly from incorporating a phylogenetic perspective into analyses of patterns and drivers of species extinction risk. We applied such an approach to analyse patterns of bumblebee (Bombus) decline. We assembled a database representing approximately 43% of the circa 260 globally known species, which included species...