Centris vogeli Roig-Alsina, 2000

Vivallo, Felipe, 2023, Taxonomic notes on the primary types of some species of Centris bees described by some entomologists from the Americas (Hymenoptera: Apidae), Iheringia, Série Zoologia (e 2023003) 113, pp. 1-18 : 4

Centris vogeli Roig-Alsina, 2000

Centris (Paracentris) vogeli ROIG-ALSINA, 2000: 189 .

Type data. This species was described based on a single male collected by the same collector and in the same locality of C. jujuyana . The holotype has the following data label: ARG. Jujuy San Pedro, Termas del Palmar 1600 m IX-1953, R N Orfila [handwritten]\ [red label with black rimmed margin] Centris vogeli sp. n. ♂ [handwritten] HOLOTYPUS [printed] A. Roig Alsina 2000 [handwritten] ( MACN) .

Type locality. Argentina: Jujuy Province: San Pedro ( Termas del Palmar ) .

Charles Michener. Charles Duncan Michener (1918–2015) was an American entomologist and the most important melittologist of the world. Greatly influenced by his parents, Michener admired the nature ( ENGEL, 2016a). During his adolescence he started studying some of the insects he collected in California with his family, making draws and keys that would later appear in his dissertation and seminal monograph on the comparative morphology of bees ( MICHENER, 1944). Michener admired one of the most proliferous naturalists of his time, Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866‒1948) and in 1932, he wrote him asking for help with the identification of some bees ( ENGEL, 2016a). Cockerell responded enthusiastically to the young teenager encourage him to obtain literature to increase his knowledge on that group of insects ( ENGEL, 2016a). Michener kept building his collection and his knowledge on several species of bees and promptly he was able to publish his first article on nest of Dianthidium singulare perluteum Cockerell, 1904 [= Dianthidium singulare (Cresson, 1879) ] which also included supplemental remarks on the morphology of the male of the subspecies ( MICHENER, 1935). Cockerell invited Michener to spend the summer at his home in Colorado after the latter’s junior year in high school. A year later he enrolled at the University of Colorado, Berkeley, graduating with his Bachelor of Science in 1939 and a Ph.D. two years later in December of 1941 ( ENGEL, 2016b). His dissertation was a comprehensive treatment of bee morphology, as well as a revised classification and evolutionary scheme for the group worldwide, although with a particular focus on the identification of the North American fauna ( ENGEL, 2016b). That work was published in 1944 and it revolutionized the study of wild bees, providing the first truly stable system from which to further explore their diversity and evolution ( ENGEL, 2016b).

The comprehensive knowledge on bee systematics that Michener had during his years of activity was unmatched. During his life a further 91 species and six genera/ subgenera would come to bear his name ( ENGEL, 2016a). His knowledge was divulged through many scientific articles and books, but also among his students. Some years after his retirement of the University of Kansas where he worked most of his life ( ENGEL, 2016b), he published the first edition of his monumental work “The Bees of the World”. The classificatory system proposed in that book was widely accepted by the melittological society and became the start point of taxonomic and phylogenetic analyses performed by students and researchers around the world. Michener passed away in Lawrence, Kansas, in 2015, aged 97.

Michener’s Centris bee. As previously mentioned, Michener was a leading expert on bees. He made countless contributions on bionomy, morphology, taxonomy and systematics at different levels of the classification of that group of insects. However, he made a relatively few number of articles citing species of Centris and in only one of them he proposed a new species from Central America.