Production of this image bank would not have been possible without the generous support of Robert and Cecily Bradshaw. We are extremely grateful for this assistance.

Most of the images were taken by Jakov Musafia and Liam Graham. We are grateful to Ken Walker for allowing us to use some of his images of Australian bees. Images of most Australian bee species are available at this link; just click on the "Explore" button and then decide which of the 5 families of bee known from Australia you would like to look investigate. Some additional images were provided by Leo Correia, Sebastian Hopfenmuller, and some are soon to be made available by Eduardo Almeida. The website was developed by Jonathan Huang, who put up with our constant changes with remarkable patience.

The system used to take the images was purchased through the Canadian Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund through Canadensys, a grant led by Anne Bruneau. This system has been invaluable for our work and we are most grateful to the funding agencies and Anne and the Canadensys team for making its purchase possible. We are grateful to Ray Larimer and his colleagues at Visionary Digital for producing this equipment, training us on how to use it and responding to queries as they arose.

Many of the bees imaged here were loaned or donated to us or obtained through exchange with other repositories of bee specimens. In particular, we are grateful to Fernando Silveira, Eduardo Almeida, Ken Walker, Jerry Rozen, Terry Griswold (Burrows, S., Christman, M., Spears, L.R., Smith-Pardo, A., Price, S., Ramirez, R.A., Griswold, T., and Redford, A.J. 2018. Exotic Bee ID. USDA APHIS Identification Technology Program (ITP), Fort Collins, CO. [16.xi.2018]), and can be found at this link), Robert Zuparko, Michael Sharkey, Agnièle Touret-Alby, Alain Pauly, Maximilian Schwarz, Dino Martins, Jakub Straka, Sam Droege and Volker Lohrmann for specimens. For the image of Hesperocolletes we thank Terry Houston, for the images of Aethammobates, Borgatomelissa male and female, and Plesiopanurgus male and female, we thank Michael Kuhlmann, and for the Niltonia images we thank Eduardo Almeida.

Many of the bees imaged from PCYU were collected by past laboratory members. We are grateful for their work. Many of the bees were collected while we were on fieldtrips that were funded from a variety of sources, primarily NSERC and National Geographic.

These images, except when provided by other researchers, can be used for any non-profit-making endeavour simply by letting us know that you are using them and telling us how you are doing so. Please consider providing a donation if you are able.

Some caveats are needed concerning some details of this image bank.

First, the classification of bees used herein is somewhat idiosyncratic, and will change as our understanding of the bees improves: the site will be updated occasionally. In general, we follow Michener (2007), but have raised some subgenera to genus level (thereby permitting their inclusion), especially when more recent work suggests this. However, we have not been consistent. The reasons for the lack of consistency are sometimes because we think that the changes might not be robust to further research, but most often it is because we have not had the opportunity to evaluate the recommendations in sufficient detail to make a decision. This image bank will change over time.

Second, this is a work in progress and the current state of the images has some shortcomings. In particular, we will be adding scale bars and adding some missing locality labels as time permits. Also, when material available is limited, some of the specimens are not exactly in pristine condition. We hope this too will change over time.

Third, obviously there are some gaps. Indeed, some bee genera are known from single specimens and so images of both sexes are impossible to obtain (examples include Hesperocolletes (male provided by Terry Houston, Western Australian Museum), Xenostelis and Ulugombakia). We will be seeking to fill as many of the remaining gaps as soon as possible. Of course, if anyone has images they are willing to let us use to fill in some of these gaps - or even better, send us specimens for the collection - please let us know.