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Recent field surveys in the eastern Canary Islands (Spain), followed by contributions of new occurrence records through the citizen science platform iNaturalist.com and the social media photo repository Flickr.com have revealed the presence of an overlooked small carder bee species (genus Pseudoanthidium Friese (Megachilidae: Anthidiini)) on the islands of Lanzarote and Fuerteventura. Here, we combined morphology, DNA barcodes (mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I, COI) and ecological data (distribution, altitudinal ranges and environmental niche classification) to describe this species as Pseudoanthidium (Pseudoanthidium) jacobii sp. nov. We provide an illustrated description along with diagnostic morphological characters to separate it from P. (P.) canariense (Mavromoustakis, 1954), the only other congeneric species known from the neighbouring islands of La Gomera, Tenerife and Gran Canaria and from which it is separated by a genetic distance of 2.7%. We also evaluated the extent of shared environmental niche space among the two Pseudoanthidium species, and our results show a significant difference in elevation range as well as a very small (less than 1%) overlap between the modelled climatic niche of P. jacobii and that of P. canariense. Given the extremely restricted geographic distribution and the fragile and isolated nature of the habitat and host plants of this new island endemic species, we assign it an IUCN conservation status of “EN” (endangered) and discuss avenues for future research on the ecology and conservation of wild bees in the Canary Islands and neighbouring regions.

Climate, landscape composition, management practice, and wild bee pollination are all variables thought to play significant roles in commercial apple production. However, how these variables affect production efficiency under field-realistic conditions has not been investigated at large geographical scales. We combined intensive standardized field surveys (using netting and pan traps) with structural equation models to explore the relative impact of biotic and abiotic variables on bee diversity, apple yield and fruit quality, and their ability to represent reliable proxies of apple production. Here we show that apple yields are mainly driven by management practice, without evidence for a significantly superior contribution by managed honey bees. Total wild bee diversity, while negatively correlated with honey bee dominance, promoted apple quality by enhancing seed set number. Our study demonstrates that even across a broad geographical range there is potential to harness wild bee diversity as nature-based solution and as a substitute to an exclusive reliance on honey bees in the context of commercial apple production.

Monitoring is an important component in pest management, to prevent or mitigate outbreaks of native pests and to check for quarantine organisms. Surveys often rely on trapping, especially when the target species respond to semiochemicals. Many traps are available for this purpose, but they are bulky in most cases, which raises transportation and deployment issues, and they are expensive, which limits the size and accuracy of any network. To overcome these difficulties, entomologists have used recycled material, such as modified plastic bottles, producing cheap and reliable traps but at the cost of recurrent handywork, not necessarily possible for all end-users (e.g., for national plant-protection organizations). These bottle-traps have allowed very large surveys to be conducted, which would have been impossible with standard commercial traps, and we illustrate this approach with a few examples. Here, we present, under a Creative Commons BY-SA License, the blueprint for a fan-trap, a foldable model, laser cut from a sheet of polypropylene, which can rapidly be produced in large numbers in a Fab lab or by a commercial company and could be transported and deployed in the field with very little effort. Our first field comparisons show that fan-traps are as efficient as bottle-traps for some Scolytinae species and we describe two cases where they are being used for monitoring.