African stingless bees

How to recognise it

Small to medium, typically 4 to 8 mm, dark and often with pale markings. Several species are barely distinguishable in the field without a specimen.

• Small dark bees at a resin-rimmed entrance in a tree, a wall, the ground, or a termite mound.
• Ground and termite-mound nesting is common in this genus and rare among Neotropical meliponines.

Body length 3–9 mm (typically 5 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Eusocial, colony survives the winter

Overlapping generations, division of labour, and a colony that persists through winter as a cluster. Honey bees, and the reason they store honey at all.

Colony size at peak

500–10,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Perennial.

Winter

No winter; stores are held against the dry season.

Castes

Queen, Worker, Male

Nesting

Existing cavities and tubes; Burrows in the ground; Resin-lined cavities

Nests in tree cavities, in the ground, and inside living termite mounds — the last being a genuinely different arrangement from the Neotropical meliponines, and one that makes non-destructive harvesting very difficult.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Year-round across the equatorial belt, with activity following the rains.

Lifecycle

1. 1Mass provisioningAs in all stingless bees: cell provisioned, egg laid, cell sealed.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Equatorial forest, woodland, farm margin and savanna across sub-Saharan Africa.

Distribution

From West Africa across the Congo basin to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and south into Zambia and Angola.

Behaviour

Short foraging ranges and generalist habits, as elsewhere in the tribe. Very little quantitative behavioural work exists.

Pollination role

Almost certainly significant for a range of African crops and wild plants, and the evidence base is thin enough that stating more than that would be overreach.

Honey

Stores small quantities, occasionally harvested

Yields are very small — frequently under a litre a colony — and most harvesting is from wild nests rather than from managed hives.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Harvested by the same honey-hunting cultures that take Apis mellifera combs from the same forests, and valued considerably above Apis honey in several traditions.

Management

Managed meliponiculture is rare in Africa compared with the Americas and Asia. Most harvesting destroys the colony, particularly where nests are inside termite mounds.

Conservation

Threatened by land clearance and by destructive harvesting, and under-recorded to the point where population trends for most species are simply unknown. That gap is a gap in research effort rather than in the bees.