#tetragonula

Same day. And silly old me, checking a fact, I found I’ve been using the bee’s old genera name - they are now Tetragonula Carbonaria.  Anytoways ...

Here we are in very closeup of the head of the xanthorrhoea flower spike with a little tetragonula in flight.  The animal is 4mm long and with a 4mm wingspan - give or take.

So that probalbly makes the stamens on each floret about 6 or 7 mm long and the emerging, unopened floret buds maybe 2mm.

I’d love to get a short lime lapse of the forets opening - but too challenging.

Go back four posts and see a similar shot 17 days ago of the spike head before any florets were even near opening.

Sneak preview of the first of post-Egypt. An Australian Grass Tree (Xanthorrhoea spp) flower spike, before the florets open and  then 18 days later after many of the florets have opened. 

The flying insect is an Australian native stingless bee, Tetragonula carbonaria. It is about 4mm long.

More than ever, the world is waking up to the importance of bees in our ecology.

More and more folk are exploring beekeeping, whether it’s for the honey harvest, the extra pollination of our food thanks to those bees working busily on all things pollen, or purely for the fascination of these brilliant insects.  (more…)

A peek inside a stingless beehive…

‘Sugarbag bees’ are the common name for Australia’s native and social stingless bees, which home themselves in hollow logs and produce these amazing hexagonal spiral combs to rear their baby bees in.

Inside the hive, there’s two main aspects of how the colony is set up – there’s the central spiral comb where the brood is housed, and the surrounding ‘sugarbag’ which is a complex arrangement of conjoined small resin pots, that the bees manufacture to hold their stores of honey and pollen.

Australia’s social stingless bees just got re-named recently, but I doubt this ancient and exquisite species noticed much. What was Trigona, is now Tetragonula. The bees remain the same.