Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862

Wood, T. J., Risch, S., Orr, M. C. & Hogan, J. E., 2025, An illustrated type catalogue of the bee species collected by Alfred Russel Wallace and described by Frederick Smith from Southeast Asia (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), European Journal of Taxonomy 1028, pp. 1-144 : 105-107

publication ID	https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2025.1028.3129
publication LSID	lsid:zoobank.org:pub:06182A07-5DB6-4916-86AF-673865690CE2
persistent identifier	https://treatment.plazi.org/id/251C1E7D-FFE8-163C-FD83-16BDFB855620
treatment provided by	Plazi
scientific name	Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862
status

Treatment

68. Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862 View in CoL

Fig. 66

Megachile laboriosa Smith, 1862: 60 View in CoL , ♂.

Type material examined

Holotype

INDONESIA • ♂; Ter. [Ternate]; [probably between 8 Jan. 1858 – 1 May 1859]; OUMNH, ENT-HYME2822 .

Type locality

Ternate.

Notes

Baker (1993: 223) wrote the following:

“ A ♂ in the UMO type collection, labelled ‘Ter.’ [white disc] and ‘ Megachile laboriosa Smith’ [Smith], is the HOLOTYPE of this species and it has now been labelled accordingly. The type is intact but for the loss of the R antenna and the apical segments of tarsus L I.

C. laboriosum belongs to a small group of medium-sized, strikingly coloured Chalicodoma centred on New Guinea. The group includes nidulator ( Smith, 1865) , tertium ( Dalla Torre, 1896) [ = senex Smith, 1865 , nec Smith, 1853, nec Smith 1862, = albiceps ( Friese, 1903)], pretiosum ( Friese, 1909), hertlei (Friese, 1911) [= regina (Cheesman, 1938) nec ( Friese, 1903)] and luteiceps (Friese, 1911) [= malayanum var. auriceps ( Meade-Waldo, 1914) ]. To what extent these and their relatives may represent colour-forms of a smaller number of species is uncertain: ♂♂ of most have not been collected, or, at least, are not present in Berlin, Leiden, London, Oxford, Paris or Wien.

Chalicodoma tertium is very perfectly mimicked by Megachile ( Callochile) lorentzi Friese, 1911 . Similar mimicry groups among strikingly patterned megachilines are more familiar in the Ethiopian fauna, where they may involve more than one subgenus each of Chalicodoma and Megachile , sometimes also Creightonella (which, on biological and structural grounds, is the more primitive of the three). Study of one such group suggests that a Megachile ( Amegachile) species is the model for mimics in two subgenera of Chalicodoma , ( Callomegachile ) and ( Pseudomegachile )”.

For the collecting date, Wallace visited the island of Ternate at least five times in 1858–1859, between 8 Jan.–1 Feb. 1858; 1–25 Mar. 1858; 15 Aug.–14 Sep. 1858; 2–9 Oct. 1858; and 20 Apr.–1 May 1859 ( Wallace 1869). Importantly, he sent a letter from Ternate between 2–9 March 1858 to Charles Darwin

(the famous “ Ternate manuscript” concerning what became the theory of evolution) ( Smith 2014). It is impossible to pin down when exactly this specimen was collected over this period.

Current status

Megachile ( Callomegachile) laboriosa Smith, 1862 ( Ascher & Pickering 2024).

Distribution

Indonesia ( North Maluku: Ternate) ( Smith 1862; Ascher & Pickering 2024).