Australian Stingless Bee

Fascinating facts about the Australian Stingless Bee

• Each brood cell is packed to the brim with honey and pollen before the queen lays an egg, then the cell is sealed and the larva develops inside a single-layer, hexagonal comb arranged in a tight spiral. The spiral design maximises space in the cavity and lets workers add new cells at the advancing front, creating a compact, easily divisible brood chamber. This architecture is why beekeepers can split a colony by simply pulling the comb apart, preserving a full complement of workers and food stores.
• Sugarbag bee colonies never truly shut down; they stay active throughout the year, but flights only happen when the air warms above eighteen degrees Celsius. This low temperature threshold means that even in cooler months the bees can still pollinate, providing steady pollination services for crops that bloom at different times of the year.
• A queen of T. carbonaria mates just once, joining a massive male swarm that can number from hundreds to thousands of drones gathering at the hive entrance for days. After a single copulation, the male inserts a mating plug and then dies, leaving the newly fertilised queen to return and start laying eggs. This single-mating system creates highly related workers.
• Beekeepers use the Original Australian Trigona Hive, a stack of two-to-three wooden boxes each measuring twenty by twenty-eight centimetres on the outside and fifteen by twenty-three centimetres inside, to rear sugarbag bees. After about seventeen months the hive reaches its final weight, and typically it takes twelve to eighteen months before a colony is heavy enough to be split for propagation. The weight reflects full honey pots and a large worker population, signalling a healthy colony.
• Female sugarbag bees rarely wander far, keeping their foraging trips inside a half-kilometre radius, while the males become long-range scouts, sometimes ending up twenty kilometres away from their home nest.

Sources

Every fact above was checked against these pages, and kept only where one of them states it.

• Wikipedia

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Australian Stingless Bee photographed on Feravox

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