Stingless Bee (Apidae: Apinae: Meliponini) Ecology

Abstract

Stingless bees form perennial colonies of honey-making insects. The >600 species of stingless bees, mainly Neotropical, live throughout tropical latitudes. Foragers influence floral biology, plant reproduction, microbe dispersal, and diverse ecosystem functions. As tropical forest residents since the upper Cretaceous, they have had a long evolutionary history without competition from honey bees. Most stingless bees are smaller than any Apis species and recruit nest mates to resources, while their defense strategies exclude stinging behavior but incorporate biting. Stingless bees have diversified ecologically; excel in nesting site selection and mutualisms with plants, arthropods, and microbes; and display opportunism, including co-opting plant defenses. As their biology becomes better known, applications to human endeavors are imposing selective pressures from exploitation and approaches to conservation that entail colony extraction from wildlands. Although some meliponines can adjust to new conditions, their populations shall require tropical diversity for survival and reproduction. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Entomology, Volume 68 is January 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Further evidences of an emerging stingless bee-yeast symbiosis

“…The fungus accumulates ergosterol, which is used by the developing insect as a precursor for ecdysteroid biosynthesis leading to the proper pupation (8,9). However, this remarkable interaction had been observed just for one bee species so far, lacking generality among Meliponini (10).…”

Deep Divergence and Genomic Diversification of Gut Symbionts of Neotropical Stingless Bees

“…With >500 described species, stingless bees present the largest and most diverse group of the social bees ( 44 , 45 ). They are naturally distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas and exhibit great variation in morphology, diet, foraging range, social structure, and nesting habits ( 44 , 45 ).…”

“…With >500 described species, stingless bees present the largest and most diverse group of the social bees ( 44 , 45 ). They are naturally distributed throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas and exhibit great variation in morphology, diet, foraging range, social structure, and nesting habits ( 44 , 45 ). As host phylogeny and ecology are both key determinants of gut microbiota composition ( 46 – 51 ), we hypothesize that genomic studies on bacterial isolates will help us to understand the functional diversity of gut bacteria of stingless bees and provide novel insights into the evolution of these bacteria across social bees, specifically in respect of the possible codiversification with the host.…”

Body size affects specialization and modularity in the global resin foraging meta-network of stingless bees

“…Stingless bees (Meliponini) comprise the most diverse group of corbiculate bees with more than 600 known eusocial species (Rasmussen et al 2017;Melo 2021;Roubik 2022) and several uses of resins in their perennial nests (Roubik 1989). In stingless bees, resins are used during nest construction, incorporated in the nest entrance to defense, and mixed with wax or soil to produce cerumen or geopropolis, respectively (Wille 1983;Roubik 1989;Shanahan and Spivak 2021).…”