What are Stingless Bees?

There are several hundred species of stingless bees (tribe Meliponini) in the tropical and southern subtropical parts of the world.

The stingless bees are a very old bee group. Fossil stingless bees have been found in amber deposits dating back about 70 million years.

Some species of stingless bees are quite large -- slightly larger than the Apis honeybee. Others are very tiny -- down to just a few mm long.

In these bees the sting is so reduced in size that it is not functional. Instead these bees carefully seal up all gaps in their nests to keep out predators.

They live in social colonies ranging from a few dozen bees up to more than 100,000 in each nest. They have a queen, sterile worker bees and drones in the nests.

Unlike the commercial Apis honeybees, stingless bee queens are too heavy to fly. So they cannot swarm out with a group of workers and make a new nest as commercial honeybees do. Instead workers find a new nest site and begin to stock it with nest materials. Then a young virgin queen from the mother nest migrates to the new nest site. The new nest remains dependent on the mother nest for some time.

They usually live inside cavities. They may use very tiny cavities such as a beetle burrow or much larger cavities such as hollows inside trees. In northern Australia, one species of stingless bee, Trigona clypearis, occupies many types of man made cavities. Nests are often seen in wall cavities, hollow doors and iron pipes. Some bizarre nest sites have also been seen such as inside the cover of a tennis racket and inside an old hollow truck tyre.

They build intricate nests out of a mixture of resin and wax, with the brood comb in the centre and pots containing honey and pollen around the edges.

In suitable climates, stingless bees can be housed in wooden boxes and kept for honey production and crop pollination. Because they are stingless, easy to handle and fascinating to watch, keeping stingless bees can also be an ideal hobby for retired people and for the kids.