With over 20,000 species described globally, wild bees are one example of a highly emblematic insect group for which conservation is tightly linked to both human welfare and ecosystem health. In the last two decades, however, high-profile reports have highlighted steep declines in both bee abundance and species diversity. Although a large part of the research on non-domesticated bees has focused on bumblebees, there is mounting evidence that the patterns of decline are affecting many other bee genera.
As part of the upcoming update of the IUCN Red List of European bees, Safeguard researchers from the University of Mons, Belgium, contributed to the establishment of the new annotated checklist of the wild bees of Europe. The original checklist, published in 2014, was revised for the first time in 2017. In the present revision of the list, the researchers add one genus, four subgenera and 67 species recently described, 40 species newly recorded since the latest revision (including two species that are not native to Europe), 26 species overlooked in the previous European checklists and 63 published synonymies.
Bringing together new literature records and taxonomic updates for this work was made possible by an exhaustive review of the literature published since the last update of the IUCN checklist of European bees, as well as by an in-depth revision of the literature omitted in the latter work and original information provided by the authors of the present work. This new list is mostly based on material directly examined by taxonomists and does not include data published online that has not otherwise been verified by European experts (e.g. observations reported on iNaturalist, Discover Life, GBIF).
The species are ordered by family, subfamily and tribe presented in alphabetical order, and listed alphabetically within the specific sections.
You can see the full list here.
Figure 1 from the publication: Map of IUCN Europe, corresponding to the geographical framework of this study