1. The whitefly Bemisia tabaci is a pest of many agricultural and ornamental crops worldwide and particularly in Africa. B. tabaci is a complex of more than 20 biotypes. Effective control of B. tabaci calls for a greater knowledge of the local biological diversity in terms of biotypes or putative species. Information is available about biotype distribution in Northern, Eastern, and Southern Africa, but data for Western Africa remain very scarce. At the time of this study, data were available for only three sampling sites in Burkina Faso, where three biotypes have been detected, the native Sub‐Saharan Africa non‐Silver Leafing (AnSL), the Sub‐Saharan Africa Silverleafing (ASL), and the Mediterranean Q biotypes, but no information is available about their respective distributions on host plant species (Gueguen et al., 2010). 2. Our study describes the biotypes and symbiotic bacterial communities of B. tabaci sampled in three …