Of the 1600 species of wild bees native to Australia, about 14 species are stingless. As stingless bees are harmless to humans, they have become an increasingly attractive addition to the suburban backyard or verandah.
Bee keeping
Most stingless bee keepers are not after honey. Rather, they enjoy the sense of conserving a native species whose original habitat is being increasingly cleared and developed. In return, the bees pollinate crops, garden flowers and bushland during their search for nectar and pollen.Stingless bees usually nest in hollow trunks and branches of trees, or rock crevices, but they have been encountered in wall cavities, old garbage bins, water metres and 44-gallon drums! However, most bee keepers keep bees in their original log hive or transfer them to a wooden box.
Like the European Honey Bee (Apis mellifera), which provide 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 from between 20 and 40 percent, to about 80 percent," Tim says.
Unlike a hive of honey bees, which can produce 75 kilograms of honey a year, a hive of stingless bees produces less than one kilogram. Stingless bee honey also has a distinctive bush taste - a mix of sweet and sour with a hint of lemon. The taste comes from plant resins - which the bees use to build their hives and honey pots - and varies depending on the flowers and trees visited.
While a number of bee keepers fill a small niche market for bush honey, the structure of stingless bee hives makes the honey difficult to extract. The bees store pollen and honey in large egg-shaped pots made of cerumen, which consists of beeswax mixed with a plant resin called propolis. These pots are irregularly arranged around a central brood comb, where the larval bees are housed."The natural living pattern of stingless bees is to centre their young in the middle of the hive, insulated from major temperature changes," Tim says.
Tim has recently designed a new hive, which retains the original brood comb space, but incorporates a second space above the chamber, where the bees can build their storage pots. This design allows bee keepers to access the honey pots, without damaging the brood comb.
Bee Rescue
As land clearing continues apace in Australia, little thought is given to tiny insects nesting in inconspicuous hollows high above ground. But six years ago, a stingless bee saviour arrived in the form of Rob Raabe and his friend Ces Heather. The pair established a "Bee Rescue Service", which today includes a core of about five men.Each has an interest in stingless bees that stems from a desire to conserve them. Some of the members sell rescued hives to help cover rescue costs, while others keep the bees to enhance pollination of crops or bushland. But they all enjoy watching the bees buzz about their backyards.
Today, Rob, Ces and three other stingless bee enthusiasts, Alan Waters, Kevin White and Col Webb, are at a property near Ipswich, west of Brisbane, that's being cleared for a fence line. Piles of fallen timber litter the paddock in readiness for burning, but one dead tree remains standing. Inside are two stingless bee hives. As I look skywards, I can just make out a black speck hovering around the knot of a broken branch. Spotting such hives, I see, requires a degree of knowledge, a good pair of binoculars and in my case, imagination.
Rob's bee-spotting skills and the techniques he uses to rescue stricken bees, have been acquired over years of observing the insects, coupled with a liberal dash of trial and error."We made a lot of mistakes in the early years, but our knowledge and skills are improving all the time," he says.
The group has also benefited from workshops run by Tim Heard, and information provided by the Australian Native Bee Research Centre in New South Wales.
We stand back as Alan starts up the chainsaw and cuts the hives away from the main trunk. The entrance to each hive tells the men that two bee species are present. The first hive entrance is surrounded by the sticky red seeds of the Cadagi tree (Eucalyptus torelliana). These seeds usually litter the entrance of Trigona carbonaria hives, as the bees acquire the seeds while foraging for resin in the gumnuts.
The second hive entrance is much less obvious and consists of a long thin tube, which extends some distance outside the hollow log. This hive belongs to Austroplebeia australis, a smaller and less active bee than T. carbonaria.As Rob and Alan open the T. carbonaria hive, expertly slicing the section of log in two, a puff of bees escapes what looks like a waxy, brown lump filling the hollow. The hive is loosened from the sides of the log and the most important part - the brood comb - is carefully extracted.
Inside the brood comb are the queen bee and thousands of larvae, which will ensure the continued survival of the hive. The T. carbonaria comb that Rob holds up for inspection is made up of thousands of cells arranged in a spiral pattern. Each cell is stocked with honey, pollen and a glandular secretion called "royal jelly", which feeds the developing larvae over about 50 days.
Working Bees
As Rob and Alan work, they tell me that the sex of the bees depends on the number of chromosomes they receive. 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 unfertilised eggs.
Female bees may become workers or queens depending on the nutrition they receive as larvae. Queen bee cells can be distinguished from other cells by their larger size, as they are stocked with more food than the worker and drone cells. When the new queens emerge, they are killed or evicted. But if the ruling queen is weak or dying, the hive will select a virgin queen to replace her.When the young worker bees emerge from their cells, they tend to remain inside the hive pursuing different jobs. Some will be involved in the on-going construction of the hive while others will remove rubbish or become nurse bees, producing royal jelly to feed the larvae. As they get older they become guards or foragers. Most die at this stage (around 80 days), although some may live to become scouts, responsible for finding food and alerting other bees in the hive to its source. At any one time, hives can contain about 10 000 workers, 10 000 larvae and several hundred drones.
When Rob and Alan finish transferring the brood comb and as many pollen and honey pots they can salvage, to a new box, they smear some of the cerumen around the entrance of the box. A pheromone released by the cerumen will enable bees to identify their hive. Importantly, the new hive will remain on site until night falls, ensuring that any workers out foraging for pollen and nectar have time to find their way home.
Rob and Alan now turn their attention to the A. australis hive. The section of log containing the hive is well preserved, so the men decide to leave the hive inside. The ends of the log are sealed with pieces of wood, to prevent predator access, and the log is transported back to Rob's place. Here the bees will happily visit the trees and flowers in his and surrounding gardens.While two more hives have been saved, Rob says thousands more hives across the country are in danger or have already been destroyed. As more people become aware of the plight of stingless bees and learn the skills of bee rescue and bee keeping however, he hopes a network of rescue services will be able to cover a much wider area.
source: www.abc.net.au
Posts
