Apoidea of the collections of Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille and Toulon Museums of Natural History (France)

Abstract Background Many insect species have shown dramatic declines over the last decades, as a result of man-related environmental changes. Many species which were formerly widespread are now rare. To document this trend with evidence, old records of collected specimens are vital. New information We provide here the data on 9752 bee (Hymenoptera: Apoidea) specimens hosted in several museums of south-east France: Musée des Confluences in Lyon, Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle de Marseille, Muséum d’Aix-en-Provence and the Muséum Départemental du Var in Toulon. Most of the specimens (9256) come from France and include data on 552 named species. For most of these specimens, the geographical location, including geographical coordinates, is based on the locality (town or village) where they were collected. The specimens were captured from the beginning of the nineteenth century to 2018. The identifications of 1377 specimens, mainly belonging to the genus Bombus, are considered reliable, as these were performed or been checked since 2009. All the other reported identifications are the original ones given by the original collectors.


Introduction
There has been a dramatic decline in insect populations over the last 70 years, both in terms of abundance (Hallmann et al. 2017, Seibold et al. 2019) and diversity (Raven and Wagner 2021).To document the past occurrences of species in areas where they have now decreased or vanished, entomologists mostly rely on material preserved in collections (e.g.Decker et al. (2020), Mathiasson and Rehan (2020)).Museum materials are what remains of past ecosystems; for some species, they represent the last testimony of their presence in a region or country and it appears crucial to extract as much information as possible from these specimens (Raven and Miller 2020), such as photographs of key specimens.In many natural history museums around the world, there are thousands of specimens stored in collections for which we barely have any information.This is particularly the case for insects, which are difficult to preserve because of pests and difficult to identify due to the taxonomic impediment (Engel et al. 2021).Yet, the importance of insects in the functioning of ecosystems should urge precise monitoring of museum collections contents.In the present time of rapid anthropogenic ecological changes at all scales, we must find ways to preserve these specimens as well as we can for as long as we can.They are vulnerable to degradation and loss from pests (Verlinden 2020), humidity (Clary 1991), fire (Escobar 2018) and the toll of time.While renewing efforts to protect them, we need to make them more accessible through digitisation, including imaging (Paterson et al. 2016) and, for a representative series of specimens, the sequencing of COI and other genes.
Amongst the various roles of insects in ecosystems, the pollination process is a key component, both in natural and man-made ecosystems (Hristov et al. 2020).Amongst pollinators, Hymenoptera is often considered as the most important insect order to pollinate flowers, followed by Diptera and Lepidoptera (Walton et al. 2020).Amongst Hymenoptera, Anthophila (bees sensu lato) is the main group of pollinators.The French bee fauna currently includes 978 species (Ropars, pers. comm.).Work is currently in progress both in revising the taxonomy of species groups which are not covered by recent reliable keys (e.g.Le Divelec (2021) on Epeolus genus) or in regional lists (e.g.Terret et al. (2020) for Franche-Comté).Despite these recent revisions, the available information about the diversity of bees within the French territory, both current and past, is still very incomplete.The design and implementation of effective conservation measures rely on the knowledge of both current and historic distribution of species (Schatz et al. 2021), which in turn, relies on the knowledge on the bee species distribution within the French territory.
The aim of the present paper is to document the collections of Apoidea hosted by the Musée des Confluences in Lyon (MHNL), the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Marseille (MHNM), the Muséum d'Aix-en-Provence (MHNAix) and the Muséum Départemental du Var (MDV) in Toulon (Table 1).The Musée des Confluences holds the second most important Natural history collection in France, after the Paris Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle.It was founded in 1772 (Clary 1995).The Marseille Museum, founded in 1819, currently holds a collection of ca.84,000 zoological specimens (Lima and Médard 2021).The Aix Museum was founded in 1838 (Sepulveda and Dutour 2006) and hosts an important collection of insects collected in the vicinity of Aix-en-Provence in the nineteenth century (Dusoulier 2006).
Ultimately, the knowledge of past occurrences of bees will be of outmost importance for documenting the evolution of bee richness and their distribution in France and to set the basis for a future French Red List of bees which still does not exist to this day.

General description
Purpose: The aim of this publication is to make public the records of Apoidea stored in the four natural history Museums of south-east France.Researchers will, therefore, know where the specimens are stored, how numerous they are and when and where they were collected.Information on who identified the specimens and when is also given, as this is important given the on-going changes in the taxonomic treatment of many species ( Rasmont et al. 2017, Gargominy et al. 2021).The past status of species now rare may then be assessed at a regional level and the original specimens may then be localised, studied and re-identified if needed.

Project description
Title: Apoidea collections in the natural history museums of south-east France.

Sampling methods
Description: All available data on the Apoidea specimens stored in the four natural history Museums were input into a table format.Most original labels include location (usually the municipality), date (sometimes only partly, such as the month), collector and an assigned species name.As the taxonomy of the Apoidea has dramatically changed over the last 150 years, we believe that an important part of the old material should be re-identified according to current knowledge.This could be done only for a part of the specimens: Bumblebees (Bombus) in the Musée des Confluences were recently revised by MI, GM and FV and all specimens at the MDV were identified since 2009; their identificationVerificationStatus column was coded "1".The data on all the other specimens have retained their original species identification and the identificationVerificationStatus column was coded "0".Gonon (1908-1994) [53 specimens], Roland Allemand (1950-2013) [29 specimens] and several others.

Sampling description:
On top of the data given on the original labels, we have added the Department (French administrative division) and the coordinates of the centre of the locality where each specimen was collected (columns decimalLatitude and decimalLongitude).This gives an approximation of ca. 5 km, depending on each locality size.
Step description: The collections of Apoidea in the Natural History Museums of Aix-en-Provence, Lyon, Marseille and Toulon were surveyed systematically.A total of 9752 specimens were recorded.A total of 1377 French specimens were either checked in MHNL or identified recently by various specialists, as in the case of the specimens from Porquerolles (Hyères, Var) in MDV.
For all other specimens, the nomenclature was checked against the list of European bees used for the IUCN Red List (Nieto et al. 2014).If the original species name did not appear in this reference list, a search was done on http://westpalbees.myspecies.info and https:// www.bwars.com/search/node/Caelioxiswebsites to find the name currently used for names recognised as synonyms.The current name was, thus, mentioned in the scientificName column, whereas the name given by the original identifier was put into the previousIdentifications column.If the original name could not be assigned unambiguously to a current name or if no identification had been given, no current species name was given in the data set.
As far as possible, the locality of origin of the specimen was identified and its latitude and longitude given by the website https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/was input.In a few cases, such as passes or forests between neighbouring localities, the precise coordinates of the location were input.In the CSV dataset format, fields are separated by tabs, all encoding is UTF-8, which allowed for all diacritic signs to be retained.Apostrophes (') were used wherever appropriate in locality names.Uncertain readings from the labels are indicated by a question mark in the verbatimEventDate or verbatimLocality fields.If the locality name was uncertain, no coordinates were given.

Geographic coverage
Description: The Apoidea specimens mainly come from south-east France (Fig. 1), but also include specimens from 24 other countries: Algeria  Coordinates: 41 and 51 Latitude; 10 and -5 Longitude.

Taxonomic coverage
Description: Specimens of at least 552 species are present in the collections of the four surveyed natural history Museums.The specimens belong to the families Apidae [3153
Species with more than 50 French specimens.

General discussion
Altogether, the studied collections hold a total of 9752 Apoidea specimens at the time of writing.A total of 9256 specimens are from mainland France or Corsica (Fig. 1) and 295 specimens have no locality information.All the following analyses are based on mainland France and Corsica data only.
Unfortunately, 5002 of the 9255 French specimens do not bear a date of collection.For some of these, the time frame was guessed using the biographic data of the collectors.If we hypothesise that the specimens from the Chabrier Collection were collected during the first half of the 19 century and the ones from Côte Collection during the first half of the 20 century, most of the specimens were collected since 1900, equally divided (about 1500 specimens) in each of the time spans 1900-1949, 1950-1999and 2000-2018 (Fig. 2 (Fig. 2).The 4253 specimens with accurate collection data (day, month, year) date from 1881 to 2018.
The temporal distribution of the data according to the IUCN criteria of the European fauna (Nieto et al. 2014) shows that most specimens belonging to endangered species were collected either in the years 1901-1950, or in the years 2000-2018 (Fig. 3, Fig. 4).Only one specimen, captured between 1950 and 2000, belonged to an endangered species (Trachusa interrupta), whereas a total of eight specimens of endangered species have been collected since 2000 (Table 5).On the other hand, four endangered species have no data since 1950: Lasioglossum quadrisignatum, Lasioglossum subfasciatum, Melitta melanura and Osmia maritima, leaving the question open as to whether they still occur in France.Altogether, the dataset holds data on ten species listed as endangered (Table 5) and eight species classified as vulnerable in Europe (Table 6).From the recently checked 1301 Bombus specimens from MHNL, 713 did not bear any previous identification label at the species level.Amongst the 588 Bombus specimens bearing identification labels, 362 (62%) had an identification label which matched the recent species check; all the other specimens had their original identification corrected.This underlines the need for experts to check Museum collections in order to validate their data.The work of presenting the basic data allows the experts to know how many specimens there are in the surveyed Museums and also when and where the specimens come from.Period of capture according to the European IUCN criteria for all surveyed Apoidea specimens.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Geographical distribution of the surveyed specimens in France, according to the holding Museums.

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Periods of captures of surveyed Apoidea specimens in the four Museums.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3. Distributions of Apoidea specimens according to European IUCN criteria.

Table 1 .
Number of recorded French Apoidea specimens by Museum.

Table 3 .
specimens], Halictidae [1866 specimens], Andrenidae [1597 specimens], Megachilidae [1092 specimens], Colletidae [527 specimens] and Melittidae [52 specimens].Forty-one genera have been identified; the genera Bombus and Andrena are present with more than a thousand specimens each (Table3).Only eleven species are represented by at least 50 specimens in the collections of the four natural history Museums (Table4).Number of specimens per genus for all French specimens.Apoidea of the collections of Lyon, Aix-en-Provence, Marseille and Toulon ...
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 Licence.All work derived from the present study should cite it appropriately, including the Museum where the material is held.DD if the date is known to the day, or YYYY-MM if only the month and the year are known, or YYYY if only the year is known.
Number of data sets: 1 Data set name: Apoidea at four Museums of SE France: Apoidea_data_SE_France.csv Download URL: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7456986Dataformat: CSV (tab delimited values) Data format version: Darwin core, so that it could be transferred later into GBIF as the identifications are checked and more precise locations entered.Description: The whole dataset includes 9752 Apoidea specimens from the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle d'Aix en Provence (MHNAix), the Musée des Confluences, Lyon (MHNL), the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle de Marseille (MHNM) and the Muséum Départemental du Var, Toulon (MDV).This dataset uncludes 1377 specimens with a recent reliable identification and 9256 with geolocalisation within France (Table 1).verbatimEventDate Date of capture, if known, in format DD/MM/YYYY.Missing data are indicated by ?scientificName Lowest taxonomic rank possible, usually the species name.If the species is unknown, the genus or family names are given.

Table 5 .
Numbers of French specimens of species classified as endangered in Europe, according to timeframes and Museums where held.

Table 6 .
Numbers of French specimens of species classified as vulnerable in Europe, according to timeframes and Museums where held.