Stingless Bee

Facts about Stingless bees, "Scientific name for Stingless bee is Meliponini". Stingless bees are also referred to as stingless honey bees or meliponines. They belong to the family of Apidae and are among the largest groups of bees consisting of 500 species. They are related to honey bees, orchid bees and bumblebees. The Stingless bees have stingers but they don’t use them for defense.

The Stingless bee are found in most parts of the world. Australia, South East Asia, Africa and America are just among the few countries. In Africa, they are found in Madagascar where they are kept for the honey. In African and South American communities, people believe that the Stingless bee honey is medicine.

Stingless bees remain active all year round except where there are cool climates. Since they don’t sting they defend their nests by all means. The Stingless bees form large colonies and have defenders. They fight back by biting and some species have secretions that can even cause blisters. Again, the Stingless bee seal their nests all round by using wax and resin just leaving the entrance available for entrance.

The Stingless bees nest on tree branches, underground cavities, hollow trunks and rock crevices. Sometimes they are even found in wall cavities or storage drums. For those that keep them for honey, they prefer to keep them in hives or wooden boxes.

However, there are some facts that you need to get right. Make sure that the hive is protected from direct winds and sun. Make sure the Stingless bees hive is near a flower garden for their nectar and pollen. If the weather is too hot, water can also be provided near the hives. There are three types of bees in the bee hive, a Drone, Worker and the Queen. A worker bee will die if she uses her stinger.
The hind legs of the Stingless beess carry pollen in them and it is called a pollen baskets. Pollen is the protein for which the baby bee needs to grow.
A Stingless bees has two stomachs, the first stomach is for eating and the other stomach is specially designed for storing nectar collected from flowers and water, for making it possible to carry it back to the hive.

Stingless beess fall in the classification of insects with six legs. Stingless beess have five eyes; three tiny ocelli eyes and two compound eyes.
The Stingless beess have four stages of life, Eggs, Larvae, Pupae and Full grown Bee.
A honeybee can fly 15 mph (24 km/ph). Its wings beat 190 times per second or 11,400 beats per minute.

Just like other bees, the Stingless bees family consists of a queen and thousands of workers. The sex of the bees depends entirely on the number of chromosomes that it receives. When you look at the female Stingless bees, you will discover that they have two chromosomes. One chromosome is obtained from the queen whereas the other one is from the male. The males just have one chromosome and are as a result of unfertilized eggs.

Though the true female Stingless bees become automatically workers, stingless bees become workers based on the food they received when they were larvae. Mostly the queen is fed with royal jelly and the workers with pollen.

The larvae of the stinging bees are not fed directly like the true bees. Nectar and pollen is placed on the cell, an egg is laid and then the cell is sealed until the adult bee emerges. It emerges just after pupation. The hive can have 300 to over 70,000 workers depending on the species. Mostly a hives contain just one queen.

In the genus melipona more queens are produced if the amount of pollen taken is large. This explains why most queen Stingless bees flee later to form their own colony. Unfortunately most of them die along the way whereas others get sickly.

In some species queens are identified by their larger sizes whereas in some others they look similar to workers. New nests are established at a secondary location by Stingless bee workers who take in a mated queen. They help her to produce her own workers and establish her own colony and the cycle continues.
The scientific name of Bee (Hymenoptera) means -membranous wings- insects have four transparent wings and the females typically have a sting. includes ants, bees, wasps, horntails, and sawflies. "Fear of bees apiphobia".