Oil-Collecting Bees

Many people know that bees rely on pollen and nectar from flowers, but some bees also depend on floral oils! A unique feature of oil-collecting bees is the spongy hairs they have on their back legs to collect floral oils. In this talk, PhD candidate Taís Ribeiro will introduce the audience to the fascinating but not-so-well-known oil-collecting bees, discussing some of the uses and sources of the floral oils they collect and the specialized interactions between some of these insects and the plants that they visit. Taís will also present some current research on the ecology and evolution of Chalepogenus, an oil-collecting bee genus from South America.

Taís Ribeiro is a PhD candidate in the Espíndola Lab in the Department of Entomology at the University of Maryland. She studies the ecology, evolution, and drivers of diversification of a genus of oil-collecting bee endemic to South America through phylogenomic, biogeographic, and climatic analyses. She is from Brazil and has a Bachelor’s degree in Biology and a Master’s in Zoology, both from the University of Brasília.