peer reviewedThe checklist of bees from metropolitan France is presented here, with an update of the previous checklist published in 1995 which included 865 species. A total of 150 species have been added to this previous checklist, 114 thanks to new distributional
records and 36 due to an update of their taxonomic status. In addition, 32 have been removed from the previous list, along with 12 species recently reported in French territory whose presence has either been refuted, deemed doubtful, or requires
confirmation. This work results in a list of the 983 confirmed bee species for metropolitan France. This high species richness is related to the high variety of climatic and biogeographic contexts throughout the country. The amount of changes between the
previous and the current checklists, most of them related to changes that happened in the past few years, illustrates the importance of keeping our efforts on improving the knowledge of the French bee fauna even today and in the years to come. This update represents an initial step toward supporting these efforts, including the forthcoming red list of French wild bees
