Stingless bees are social bees that live in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. All species produce honey, which has been appreciated by humans since ancient times. Here, the general panorama of meliponiculture is presented. Deforestation and poor management are the main problems faced by this incipient industry. For a profitable meliponiculture, much more biological information is needed, as well as field studies in natural conditions. In the near future, we suggest that the successful use of these pollinators will promote the development of new breeding techniques and commercialization possibilities, which must be designed to be sustainable.

The genetic structure of social insect colonies is predicted to affect the balance between cooperation and conflict. Stingless bees are of special interest in this respect because they are singly mated relatives of the multiply mated honeybees. Multiple mating is predicted to lead to workers policing each others' male production with the result that virtually all males are produced by the queen, and this prediction is borne out in honey bees. Single mating by the queen, as in stingless bees, causes workers to be more related to each others' sons than to the queen's sons, so they should not police each other. We used microsatellite markers to confirm single mating in eight species of stingless bees and then tested the prediction that workers would produce males. Using a likelihood method, we found some worker male production in six of the eight species, although queens produced some males in all of them. Thus the predicted contrast with honeybees is observed, but not perfectly, perhaps because workers either lack complete control or because of costs of conflict. The data are consistent with the view that there is ongoing conflict over male production. Our method of estimating worker male production appears to be more accurate than exclusion, which sometimes underestimates the proportion of males that are worker produced.

Insect societies are well known for their high degree of cooperation, but their colonies can potentially be exploited by reproductive workers who lay unfertilized, male eggs, rather than work for the good of the colony. Recently, it has also been discovered that workers in bumblebees and Asian honeybees can succeed in entering and parasitizing unrelated colonies to produce their own male offspring. The aim of this study was to investigate whether such intraspecific worker parasitism might also occur in stingless bees, another group of highly social bees. Based on a large-scale genetic study of the species Melipona scutellaris, and the genotyping of nearly 600 males from 45 colonies, we show that approximately 20% of all males are workers' sons, but that around 80% of these had genotypes that were incompatible with them being the sons of workers of the resident queen. By tracking colonies over multiple generations, we show that these males were not produced by drifted workers, but rather by workers that were the offspring of a previous, superseded queen. This means that uniquely, workers reproductively parasitize the next-generation workforce. Our results are surprising given that most colonies were sampled many months after the previous queen had died and that workers normally only have a life expectancy of approximately 30 days. It also implies that reproductive workers greatly outlive all other workers. We explain our results in the context of kin selection theory, and the fact that it pays workers more from exploiting the colony if costs are carried by less related individuals.

Research on bee communication has focused on the ability of the highly social bees, stingless bees (Hymenoptera, Apidae, Meliponini) and honeybees (Apidae, Apini), to communicate food location to nest-mates. Honeybees can communicate food location through the famous waggle dance. Stingless bees are closely related to honeybees and communicate food location through a variety of different mechanisms, many of which are poorly understood. We show that a stingless bee, Trigona hyalinata, uses a pulsed mass-recruitment system that is highly focused in time and space. Foragers produced an ephemeral, polarized, odour trail consisting of mandibular gland secretions. Surprisingly, the odour trail extended only a short distance away from the food source, instead of providing a complete trail between the nest and the food source (as has been described for other stingless bees). This abbreviated trail may represent an intermediate strategy between full-trail marking, found in some stingless bees, and odour marking of the food alone, found in stingless bees and honeybees.

Stingless bees (Meliponini) construct their own species‐specific nest entrance. The size of this entrance is under conflicting selective pressures. Smaller entrances are easier to defend; however, a larger entrance accommodates heavier forager traffic. Using a comparative approach with 26 species of stingless bees, we show that species with greater foraging traffic have significantly larger entrances. Such a strong correlation between relative entrance area and traffic across the different species strongly suggests a trade‐off between traffic and security. Additionally, we report on a significant trend for higher forager traffic to be associated with more guards and for those guards to be more aggressive. Finally, we discuss the nest entrance of Partamona, known in Brazil as boca de sapo, or toad mouth, which has a wide outer entrance but a narrow inner entrance. This extraordinary design allows these bees to finesse the defensivity/traffic trade‐off.

A comunidade de abelhas nativas em uma área de mata atlântica no sul do Brasil foi estudada no período 2001-2003, utilizando-se rede entomológica em plantas floridas. Foram amostrados 1.519 indivíduos de 80 espécies e 4 subfamílias de abelhas. Houve predomínio de espécies de Apinae não corbiculadas e Halictinae e de indivíduos de Apinae corbiculados e Halictinae. As plantas associadas totalizaram 124 espécies de 46 famílias, das quais as mais visitadas foram Asteraceae, Fabaceae, Lamiaceae e Melastomataceae. Foram amostradas 11 espécies de abelhas não assinaladas para Santa Catarina. As abelhas mais amostradas foram Apis mellifera, Trigona spinipes, Bombus morio, Dialictus sp., Augochloropsis sp. 07, Trigona braueri, Augochlora (Oxystoglossella) sp. 05 e Tetragonisca angustula. A quantidade de indivíduos amostrados por mês, ao longo do período de coleta, evidencia um padrão bivoltino (maio e setembro-novembro). Algumas espécies de plantas foram visitadas apenas por Apis mellifera. Os índices de diversidade e equabilidade ficaram em 2,315 e 0,528, respectivamente. A curva de acumulação mostrou-se crescente. Os estimadores de riqueza apontam mais espécies. A riqueza e a abundância evidenciam um padrão de atividade de clima temperado. A composição da apifauna demonstrou maior similaridade com formação de floresta ombrófila densa de terras baixas.

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ABStrACt. Bee males (drones) of stingless bees tend to congregate near entrances of conspecific nests, where they wait for virgin queens that initiate their nuptial flight. We observed that the Neotropical solitary wasp Trachypus boharti (Hymenoptera, Cabronidae) specifically preys on males of the stingless bee Scaptotrigona postica (Hymenoptera, Apidae); these wasps captured up to 50 males per day near the entrance of a single hive. Over 90% of the wasp attacks were unsuccessful; such erroneous attacks often involved conspecific wasps and worker bees. After the capture of nonmale prey, wasps almost immediately released these individuals unharmed and continued hunting. A simple behavioral experiment showed that at short distances wasps were not specifically attracted to S. postica males nor were they repelled by workers of the same species. Likely, short-range prey detection near the bees' nest is achieved mainly by vision whereas closerange prey recognition is based principally on chemical and/or mechanical cues. We argue that the dependence on the wasp's visual perception during attack and the crowded and dynamic hunting conditions caused wasps to make many preying attempts that failed. Two wasp-density-related factors, Unsuccessful hunting attacks by drone-predating wasps wasp-prey distance and wasp-wasp encounters, may account for the fact that the highest male capture and unsuccessful wasp bee encounter rates occurred at intermediate wasp numbers.