Stingless Bees

Stingless bees are a large group of bees in the family Apidae. Stingless bees are found in most tropical and subtropical parts of the world, including Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. There are several hundred species of stingless bees worldwide. Some of the genera of stingless bees are Trigona, Hypotrigona, Nannotrigona, Oxytrigona, Paratrigona, Scaptotrigona, Trigonisca, Plebeia, Austroplebeia, Melipona and Meliponula.

Most stingless bee species live in tree hollows though some build in the nests of ants or termites. Because stingless bees cannot sting, they usually seal up all unnecessary openings in their nest cavity with resin to keep out predators.

Stingless bees have a social structure very similar to that of the commercial honey bee, Apis mellifera. They have a queen bee, male drone bees and sterile worker bees.

However, in other ways the stingless bees are very different from commercial honey bees:

-- Many species of stingless bees are small, black bees only 4-6 mm long whilst commercial honey bees are about 12mm long and are yellow brown, or dark brown to black in colour.

-- Stingless bees mix plant resins into the wax they use to build their nest structures so their nests are usually mid to dark brown in colour. Commercial honey bees build most parts of their nests from pure cream coloured wax.

-- Stingless bee colony sizes can range from over 100,000 bees down to just a few dozen bees to whilst strong commercial honey bee colonies generally have 20,000 to 60,000 bees.

Stingless bees make small quantities of a delicious aromatic honey that is harvested by beekeepers in many parts of the world. The earliest records of keeping stingless bees come from the Maya people on the Yacatan Peninsula in Mexico. There methods used to keep stingless bees today are essentially the same as those used over 2000 years ago.

Two of the better known species of Australian stingless bees are Trigona carbonaria and Austroplebeia australis. These bees perform the important role of pollinating native plants, crops and garden flowers during their search for nectar and pollen. Methods have been developed for keeping these species in small wooden boxes and they can be used to pollinate crops of macadamias, strawberries, lychees, watermelons and mangoes.