Wing venation is widely used in insect systematics, but the extent to which bee wing morphology reflects phylogenetic divergence, taxonomic identity, and body-size scaling remains poorly understood. Here, we used geometric morphometrics to quantify forewing venation across 17 bee species representing 17 genera and five families. We placed nine homologous landmarks on wing vein intersections and analyzed shape variation among species, subfamilies, and families. We also tested whether wing morphology contained phylogenetic signal, compared a morphology-inferred tree with a molecular reference phylogeny, and evaluated whether wing shape covaried with intertegular distance, a proxy for body size.
Wing morphology reliably distinguished taxa at multiple hierarchical levels, with high classification accuracy among species, subfamilies, and families. Landmark data also showed strong phylogenetic signal, and the wing morphology-inferred tree showed moderate concordance with the molecular reference phylogeny. However, intertegular distance explained a substantial proportion of variation in the primary canonical variate, indicating that allometric scaling is a major driver of bee wing venation. These findings suggest that bee forewing morphology contains taxonomic and phylogenetic information, but that this signal is strongly shaped by size-related constraints. Our results highlight allometry as a key factor in interpreting wing morphometric variation and support the use of wing venation as a complementary tool for bee identification, comparative morphology, and studies of evolutionary divergence.
Publication Date: 2026-06-19