Taxonomic description of allodapine bees from the Zanzibar archipelago genus Macrogalea (Hymenoptera: Apidae)

Recent molecular phylogenetic work on allodapine bees (Apidae, Xylocopinae), reported elsewhere, has shown that the tropical African genus Macrogalea is the most basal genus in the tribe Allodapini, and studies on this genus are likely to provide important insights into social evolution in the xylocopine bees. A new species, Macrogalea magenge from Pemba Island, Tanzania, and the previously unrecorded male of M. zanzibarica are described. Genetic divergence data, from one nuclear and two mitochondrial gene fragments, for M. candida, M. zanzibarica and M. magenge are compared with intra-generic pairwise distances of other allodapine taxa.