The genomes sequenced for the neotropical stingless bees Scaptotrigona bipunctata and S. depilis strengthen the phylogenomics support for the taxonomy of social bees

Bees are fundamental factors in ecology and agriculture due to their ecosystem services as pollinators, including many important crops. Because of its ecological significance and value to humans, the honey bee, Apis mellifera, was one of the earliest insect species targeted for genome sequencing, and over the last decades, many other species of social bees, including practically all species comprising the genus Apis and dozens of bumble bee species (Bombini) have complete genome assemblies deposited in public databases. The largest clade of the social bees, the stingless bees (Meliponini), is, however, strongly underrepresented. To date, only five genomes for species of three genera have been released for the New World stingless bees, which comprise over 400 species distributed in 32 genera. Different from the honey bee, these species are native to the Neotropics, being important pollinators of many native plants and cultivars, including greenhouse cultures. We present here the genome assemblies for two species of the genus Scaptotrigona, one of the largest genera among the stingless bees in Brazil. The new datasets are highly complete and, as shown in our phylogenomics analysis, these genomes provide robust support for the clades of the corbiculate bees and their evolutionary history.