Literature Review On Stingless Bees

2.0 Literature Review

2.1 Stingless Bee

Stingless bees or sometimes called as stingless honey bee are social bees which lack a functional sting. They store honey and pollen. They belong to the order Hymenoptera and the family of Apidae within which is the tribe Meliponini or meliponines, which are found in abundance in tropical and suctropical climates Meliponines cannot migrate (David, 2006a 200b). They have populated tropical earth for over 65 million years, longer than Apis, the stinging honey bees (Camargo and Pedro, 1992; Michener, 2000). These bees live in perennial colonies composed of a few hundred to several thousand workers and utilise the resins of more than one hundred different plant species for food, nest construction, and chemical defenses (Sakagami, 1982; Wilms et al., 1996; Leonhardt et al., 2009). Meliponines have these kind of characteristics including they generally have no sting and they mate mate only once, they do not use water to cool their nest or pure wax to build it, cannot freely swarm to reproduce (but instead must first make a new domicile) and the males feed at flowers while the gravid queens cannot fly (Peters et al., 1999).

Stingless bee and honey bees can be differentiated by observing their nest architecture and propagation and the way they communicate food sources to fellow workers. The structure of the nest of stingless bee is complex and unique where the inner sanctum of the nest consists of brood chamber, a grouping of cells