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. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum Entomology. CHECKLIST OF BUMBLE BEES 3000 2500 83 2000 g 1500 1000 500. 1750 1770 1790 1810 1830 1850 1870 1890 Date of description 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 Fig. 3 Rate (lower grey) and cumulative number (upper while) of all descriptions with classical names for bumble bee species, subspecies and infrasubspecies since the starting point of zoological nomenclature in 1758 (from a manuscript catalogue, unpublished). distinct from specimens collected from another distant area, because character variation is apt on average to be greater (Gaston, Blackburn &
. Bulletin of the Natural History Museum Entomology. CHECKLIST OF BUMBLE BEES 3000 2500 83 2000 g 1500 1000 500. 1750 1770 1790 1810 1830 1850 1870 1890 Date of description 1910 1930 1950 1970 1990 Fig. 3 Rate (lower grey) and cumulative number (upper while) of all descriptions with classical names for bumble bee species, subspecies and infrasubspecies since the starting point of zoological nomenclature in 1758 (from a manuscript catalogue, unpublished). distinct from specimens collected from another distant area, because character variation is apt on average to be greater (Gaston, Blackburn & Loder, 1995). For the bumble bee catalogue data, the number of synonyms (including subspecies, but excluding infrasubspecies) is correlated with both the date of first description and the range size of a species independ- ently of one another, although slightly more of the variation is explained by variation in range size (par- tial r. Table 1). Many of the species with large range sizes, early dates of first formal description and many synonyms are found in western Europe ( triangles at the left and upper part of Fig. 4). Most of these species occur in either the lowland areas of Europe where early naturalists were most active, such as Britain, or else are nearly circumpolar in their distribu- tion. Curiously, all of the infrasubspecific names (34% of all names as interpreted at present) belong to the bumble bee species of the Old World (Fig. 5). Species of the Old World also have more synonyms and sub- species per species than do the species of the New World (numbers of names log-transformed and ex- cluding 6 Holarctic species, ?,,,= with separate variance estimates, p< ). One possible explanation for the greater numbers of names per species for bumble bees of the Old World is that they might have broader distributions than the species of the New World (see above). This could arise because the Old World has a slightly larger total area of suitable habita
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