Welcome to BeeTree, which provides access to a bee supermatrix phylogeny and associated data. The phylogeny includes 4,586 species of the >20,000 currently described bee species. You can find more information about the phylogenetic coverage of the tree here.
Bees are an economically and ecologically important group of insects, with diverse life-histories, social behaviour and morphology. By making phylogenetic information freely available and accessible, we hope to promote a better understanding of this wonderful group of insects.
This website provides access to a curated compilation of much of the available sequence data of bees as of mid 2023. The phylogeny (and a set of 1,000 bootstrap trees converted to dated chronograms) can be downloaded in full or trimmed to a subset of species of interest. For more information on our supermatrix data and trees see downloads.
If you use the supermatrix or any of the byproducts of this work included on the website, please cite:
Henríquez-Piskulich, P.; Hugall, A.F.; Stuart-Fox; D. 2024. A supermatrix phylogeny of the world’s bees (Hymenoptera: Anthophila). Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution 190, 107963. doi:10.1016/j.ympev.2023.107963.
