Despite the long intertwined evolutionary histories of bees and plants, bee diversity peaks in the xeric areas of the eastern and western hemispheres and not the tropics, where plant diversity is greatest. Intensive sampling in the northeast Chihuahuan Desert of Mexico and the United States provide the first quantitative estimate of bee species richness where high diversity had been predicted in North America from museum records. We find that the density of bee species in a limited area of 16 km2 far exceeds any other site in the world and amounts to approximately 14% of the bee species described from the United States. Long-term studies of bees and other pollinators from areas that are minimally impacted by humans provide much-needed baseline data for studies of bees where human impacts are more severe and as climate change accelerates.

中文翻译：

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北美温暖沙漠中蜜蜂（蚜虫，膜翅目）的极端物种密度

尽管蜜蜂和植物的进化历史长期纠缠在一起，但蜜蜂的多样性在东西半球的干旱地区而不是在热带地区（植物多样性最大的热带地区）达到顶峰。墨西哥和美国东北部奇瓦瓦沙漠的密集采样提供了蜜蜂物种丰富度的第一个定量估计值，而根据博物馆的记录，北美地区已经预测到蜜蜂物种丰富度很高。我们发现，在16 km2的有限区域内，蜜蜂物种的密度远远超过了世界上其他任何地方，约占美国描述的蜜蜂物种的14％。蜜蜂和其他传粉媒介的长期研究来自受人类影响最小的地区，为蜜蜂研究带来了急需的基线数据，这些蜜蜂对人类的影响更为严重，并且随着气候变化的加速发展。