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Stingless bees, sometimes called stingless honey bees or simplymeliponines, are a large group of bees (approximately 500 species), comprising the tribe Meliponini[1] (or subtribe Meliponina according to other authors[2]). They belong in the family Apidae, and are closely related to commonhoney bees, carpenter bees, orchid bees and bumblebees.[3] The common name is slightly misleading as male bees and bees of other species, such as those in the family Andrenidae, cannot sting. Meliponines have stingers, but they are highly reduced and cannot be used for defense.[1]
Stingless bees can be found in most tropical or subtropical regions of the world, such as Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and tropical America.[1][2] The majority of native eusocial bees of Central and South America are stingless bees, although only a few of them produce honey on a scale such that they are farmed by humans.[4][5] They are also quite diverse in Africa, includingMadagascar,[6] and are farmed there also; meliponine honey is prized as a medicine in many African communities as well as in South America.[7]
Being tropical, stingless bees are active all year round, although they are less active in cooler weather, with some species presenting diapause.[8][9] Unlike other eusocial bees, they do not sting but will defend by biting if their nest is disturbed. In addition, a few (in the genus Oxytrigona) have mandibular secretions that cause painful blisters. Despite their lack of a sting, stingless bees, being eusocial, may have very large colonies made formidable by the number of defenders.[10]
Stingless bees usually nest in hollow trunks, tree branches, underground cavities, or rock crevices but they have also been encountered in wall cavities, old rubbish bins, water meters, and storage drums. Many beekeepers keep the bees in their original log hive or transfer them to a wooden box, as this makes it easier to control the hive.[11][12][13]
The bees store pollen and honey in large egg-shaped pots made of beeswax, typically mixed with various types of plant resin (sometimes called "propolis"). These pots are often arranged around a central set of horizontal brood combs, where the larval bees are housed. When the young worker bees emerge from their cells, they tend to remain inside the hive, performing different jobs. As workers age, they become guards or foragers. Unlike the larvae of honey bees, meliponine larvae are not fed directly. The pollen and nectar are placed in a cell, an egg is laid, and the cell is sealed until the adult bee emerges after pupation ("mass provisioning"). At any one time, hives can contain 300–80,000 workers, depending on species.
In a simplified sense, the sex of each bee depends on the number of chromosomes it receives. Female bees have two sets of chromosomes (diploid)—one set from the queen and another from one of the male bees or drones. Drones have only one set of chromosomes (haploid), and are the result of unfertilized eggs, though inbreeding can result in diploid drones.
Unlike true honey bees, whose female bees may become workers or queens strictly depending on what kind of food they receive as larvae (queens are fed royal jelly and workers are fed pollen), the caste system in meliponines is variable, and commonly based simply on the amount of pollen consumed; larger amounts of pollen yield queens in the genus Melipona. There is also a genetic component however, and as much as 25%[14] (typically 5–14%) of the female brood may be queens. Queen cells in the former case can be distinguished from others by their larger size, as they are stocked with more pollen, but in the latter case the cells are identical to worker cells, and scattered among the worker brood. When the new queens emerge, they typically leave to mate, and most die.[15] New nests are not established via swarms, but by a procession of workers who gradually construct a new nest at a secondary location. The nest is then joined by a newly mated queen, at which point many workers take up permanent residence and help the new queen raise her own workers. If a ruling queen is herself weak or dying, then a new queen can replace her.[citation needed] For Plebeia quadripunctata, although less than 1% of female worker cells produce dwarf queens, they comprise six out of seven queen bees, and one out of five proceed to head colonies of their own. They are reproductively active but less fecund than large queens.[15]
In warm areas of Australia, these bees can be used for minor honey production. They may also be kept successfully in boxes in these areas. Special methods are being developed to harvest moderate amounts of honey from stingless bees in these areas without causing harm.
Like the European honey bee (Apis mellifera), which provides most of Australia's commercially produced honey, stingless bees have enlarged areas on their back legs for carrying pollen back to the hive. After a foraging expedition, these pollen baskets or corbiculae can be seen stuffed full of bright orange or yellow pollen. Stingless bees also collect nectar, which they store in an extension of their gut called a crop. Back at the hive, the bees ripen or dehydrate the nectar droplets by spinning them inside their mouthparts until honey is formed. Ripening concentrates the nectar and increases the sugar content, though it is not nearly as concentrated as the honey from true honey bees; it is much thinner in consistency, and more prone to spoiling.
Stingless bees store their aromatic honey in clusters of small resin pots near the extremities of the nest. For honey production, the bees need to be kept in a box specially designed to make the honey stores accessible without damaging the rest of the nest structure. Some recent box designs for honey production provide a separate compartment for the honey stores so that honey pots can be removed without spilling honey into other areas of the nest.
Unlike a hive of commercial honeybees, which can produce 75 kilograms of honey a year, a hive of Australian stingless bees produces less than one kilogram. Stingless bee honey has a distinctive "bush" taste—a mix of sweet and sour with a hint of fruit. The taste comes from plant resins—which the bees use to build their hives and honey pots—and varies at different times of year depending on the flowers and trees visited.
Australian farmers rely heavily on the introduced Western honey bee to pollinate their crops. However, for some crops native bees may be better pollinators. Stingless bees have been shown to be valuable pollinators of crops such asmacadamias and mangoes. They may also benefit strawberries, watermelons, citrus, avocados, lychees and many others. Research into the use of stingless bees for crop pollination in Australia is still in its very early stages, but these bees show great potential. Studies at the University of Western Sydney[17] have shown these bees' excellent ability to work in confined areas such as glasshouses.
Although the colony sizes of most of these bees are much smaller than those of the European honey bee, the per bee productivity can be quite high, with colonies containing less than a thousand bees being able to produce up to 3 or 4 liters of honey every year. Probably the world champion in honey productivity, the manduri (Melipona Marginata) live in swarms with only about 300 individuals, but even so it can produce up to 3 liters of honey a year in the right conditions. One of the smallest among all bees in the genus Melipona, with lengths ranging from 6 to 7 mm, this bee has being used in some countries such as Japan and Germany as a pollinator for glasshouses. Although they do not tend to attack if not molested, when they feel the nest is under menace their reaction is violent, with these tiny bees biting strong enough to hurt human skin.
Species of the genus Scaptotrigona have very large colonies, with up to 20,000 individuals, and can produce from 8 to 12 liters of honey a year. But they are somewhat aggressive and thus not popular among Brazilian meliponine beekeepers. Some large breeders have more than 3,000 hives of the tamer but still highly productive species in the genus Melipona, such as the tiúba, the true uruçu, and the jandaíra, each with 3,000 or more bees per colony, and can produce over 1.5 tons of honey every year (in large bee farms the availability of flowers limits the honey production per colony). Being considered more palatable because of not being overly sweet and also having medicinal properties more pronounced than honey from bees of the apis genus due to the presence of anti-microbial substances at a much higher level, the honey from stingless bees returns very high values in markets, with prices as much as five to ten times greater than the common honey produced by European or Africanized bees. This makes production very interesting, even though much larger numbers of beehives are required to produce amounts of honey comparable to European or Africanized bees.
The honey from stingless bees has a lighter color and a higher water content, from 25% up to 35%, compared to the honey from the genus apis, whose honey consists of 20% or less of water. This contributes to its less cloying taste but also causes it to spoil more easily. Thus, for marketing this honey needs to be processed through desiccation or pasteurization. In its natural state it should be kept under refrigeration.
Due to the lack of a functional stinger and characteristic non-aggressive behavior of many Brazilian species of stingless bees, they can be kept without problems in densely populated environments such as cities, provided there are enough flowers at their disposal nearby. Some breeders (called meliponicultors) can produce honey even in apartments, up to the 12th floor.
Despite being in general fairly peaceful, with exception of a few species like the tubuna (Scaptotrigona bipuntacta), most Brazilian meliponini bees will usually react if their hives are molested, nipping with their jaws, entangling themselves in the hair, trying to enter in the ears or the nose and releasing propolis or even acid over their aggressors. But some species as the mandaçaia are extremely tame, not attacking humans even when their hives are opened for honey extraction or colony division. This, plus the fact it only form small colonies with 300 to 500 individuals, makes them particularly suitable for keeping at home as pets. One single rational beehive of mandaçaia can produce up to 4 liters of honey a year, making the species very attractive for home keepers, and being a fairly large bee with length up to 11mm it has a better body heat control, living in regions where temperature can drop a little lower than 0 °C. However, it is somewhat selective about which flowers to visit preferring the flora that occurs in their natural environment, and is thus difficult to be kept outside its region of origin, which is along the east coast of Brazil, from the state of Bahia to the south.
Other species like the tiúba and the true-uruçu are also very tame and highly productive. Their colonies have from 3.000 to 5.000 insects of the same size as the honey bees, and can produce up to 8 liters a year of honey. They can be easily kept at home, but will only survive in regions with warm climate, their larvae dying in temperatures lower than 12°C. The beautiful yellow uruçu, by another hand, can survive to temperatures lower than 0°C and their colonies, bearing about 3.500 individuals, can produce up to 6 liters of honey a year. But this species will react with powerful nipping if their nests are molested, and usually they are only kept by professional meliponicultors.
Another suitable species for keeping at home is the guaraipo (Melipona bicolor). It is also quite tame never attacking the beekeeper, their colonies have less than 600 individuals, they can withstand temperatures as low as -10 °C and each colony can produce over three liters of honey a year. One interesting thing about this species is that their colonies usually have more than one single queen at a time (usually two or three, but there can be up to five), a phenomenon called polygyne. But once very common, the guaraipo is now rather rare in nature, mainly due to the destruction of the forests where they could be found, in the south-southeast of Brazil.
Other groups of Brazilian stingless bees, belonging to the tribe trigonini, genera plebeia and leurotrigona, are also very tame and much smaller, one of them (Plebeia minima) reaching no more than 2.5 mm in length, and the lambe-olhos (licks-eyes, Leurotrigona muelleri) being even smaller, with no more than 1.5 mm. Many of these species are generally known as "mirim" (kid), and they can be kept in very small artificial hives thus being of interest for keepers who want them as pollinator agents in small glasshouses or just for the pleasure of having a "toy" bee colony at home. Being so tiny these species produce only a very small amount of honey, typically less than 500 ml a year, and therefore are not interesting for commercial honey production.
Belonging to the same Trigonini group, the jatai (Tetragonisca Angustula), the marmelada (Frieseomelitta Varia) and the moça-branca (Frieseomelitta Doederleini ) have intermediate sizes between those very small species and the European bee. They are very adaptable species, mainly the Jataí, and can be kept in many different regions and environments being quite common in most Brazilian cities. The jataí can bite when molested but its jaws are too weak and in practice they are harmless, while the marmelada and moça-branca usually deposit propolis on their aggressors. Producing up to 1,5 litters a year of a honey considered among the best from stingless bees, the jataí was one of the first species to be kept by home beekeepers. Their nests can be easily identified in trees or wall cavities by the wax pipe they build at the entrance, usually guarded by some soldier bees which have recently been found to be bigger and stronger than regular worker bees. The marmelada and moça-branca make a little less honey, but it is denser and sweeter than most of stingless bees, being considered very tasteful.
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