Bombus glacialis Friese, 1902 is an Arctic bumblebee that was thought to have a disjunctive range on the Arctic Ocean Islands, i.e., on Novaya Zemlya and Wrangel Island, with a 3600 km gap between these isolates. While the species status of the Novaya Zemlya’s population was recently confirmed using a molecular approach, its close affinities to the Wrangel’s isolate were proposed by a morphological similarity alone. Here, we report that B. glacialis samples from Wrangel share three unique COI haplotypes, which are closely related to each other and to those inferred from samples from Novaya Zemlya. Based on a combination of diagnostic morphological and molecular characters, the Wrangel’s population is described here as a new subspecies, Bombus glacialis marinae ssp. nov. Our novel data indicate that this species can be considered a polar relict that had had a much broader distribution along the continental margin of Eurasia during the Pleistocene. The two subspecies of B. glacialis were likely separated in the Middle Pleistocene (mean age = 0.27 Myr, 95% CI = 0.12–0.46 Myr) due to increasing of the sea level during an interglacial. The Novaya Zemlya Archipelago supported a B. glacialis population in the Late Pleistocene. Hence, this insular land was not covered completely by ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum. Our findings highlight that relict cold-adapted Pleistocene lineages still survive on remote islands in the Arctic Ocean and that such lineages are highly threatened by recent climate warming.

Bombus glacialis Friese, 1902 是一种北极熊蜂，被认为在北冰洋群岛（即新地岛和弗兰格尔岛）有一个分离的范围，这些分离群之间有 3600 公里的间隔。虽然最近使用分子方法证实了新地岛种群的物种状态，但仅通过形态相似性就提出了它与弗兰格尔分离株的密切关系。在这里，我们报告来自弗兰格尔的B. glacialis样本共享三个独特的COI单倍型，它们彼此密切相关，并且与从新地岛的样本推断的那些密切相关。基于诊断形态学和分子特征的组合，弗兰格尔种群在这里被描述为一个新的亚种，Bombus glacialis marinae ssp。十一月 我们的新数据表明，该物种可以被视为极地遗迹，在更新世期间沿欧亚大陆的大陆边缘分布更广。由于间冰期海平面升高，B. glacialis的两个亚种可能在中更新世（平均年龄 = 0.27 Myr，95% CI = 0.12–0.46 Myr）分离。新地岛群岛支持B. glacialis更新世晚期的人口。因此，在末次冰期最大值期间，这片岛屿陆地并未完全被冰盖覆盖。我们的研究结果强调，在北冰洋的偏远岛屿上仍然存在残余的适应寒冷的更新世谱系，并且这些谱系受到最近气候变暖的高度威胁。