Robber stingless bees
A genus rather than a single species — Around 20 species across the Neotropics, all of them obligate robbers of other stingless bee colonies. General statements below are statements about the group.
The stingless bees that gather no food of their own. Lestrimelitta have lost the pollen-carrying apparatus entirely and live by raiding other meliponine nests — a whole genus of eusocial bees that has abandoned foraging, and the clearest possible demonstration that being a stingless bee does not mean producing honey worth harvesting.
Can it sting?
No functional sting, and they bite readily during a raid. The lemon smell is the more memorable defence.
How to recognise it
Small to medium, 5 to 8 mm, shiny black, and conspicuously lacking the pollen baskets every other stingless bee carries. They smell strongly of lemon or citronella when disturbed.
- No corbicula — the hind legs are smooth, which no foraging bee's are.
- A powerful lemon scent from the mandibular glands, used to disorganise a raided colony.
- Never seen on flowers, which for a bee is close to diagnostic.
Body length 4–9 mm (typically 6 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
- 500–6,000 individuals
- Colony lifespan
- Perennial, sustained entirely by raiding.
- Winter
- No winter; stores are taken from other colonies rather than gathered.
- Castes
- Queen, Worker, Male
- Nesting
- Existing cavities and tubes; Resin-lined cavities
Nests conventionally in cavities. What is unconventional is where the contents come from — cerumen, pollen and honey are all carried in from raided nests.
- Carries pollen
- Carries no pollen for young
- On the wing
- January to December
Year-round, following the availability of colonies to raid rather than of flowers.
Lifecycle
- RaidingScouts locate a target colony, then workers arrive in force, release citral from the mandibular glands to disorganise the defenders, and carry off food stores and building material over hours or days. A raided colony is frequently destroyed outright.
Where it lives and what it does
- Habitat
- Wherever their host species occur — forest, plantation, farmland and towns.
- Distribution
- Mexico through Central and South America to northern Argentina.
- Behaviour
- Obligately cleptobiotic: they visit no flowers and collect no nectar or pollen directly. Everything the colony eats has been taken from another colony.
- Pollination role
- None. This genus does not visit flowers, and is a rare case of a bee with no pollination role at all.
- What it forages on
- No floral preferences, because there are no floral visits. The genus feeds exclusively on food robbed from other stingless bee colonies.
Honey
Produces no honey
Lestrimelitta stores honey robbed from other colonies, and it is not harvested. Beyond the ethics of taking twice-stolen stores, the citral the bees produce taints it, and a meliponiculturist regards a Lestrimelitta nest near an apiary as a problem to be removed rather than a resource.
Relationship with people
- How people interact with it
- Regarded across Latin American meliponiculture as a pest. A raid can destroy a managed colony in a day, and keepers site and screen apiaries specifically against them.
- Management
- Not managed. Where a nest is found near an apiary it is usually destroyed or relocated.
- Conservation
- Not of conservation concern, and dependent on healthy host populations — an abundance of Lestrimelitta implies an abundance of the colonies they raid.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this bee
- Stingless bees vs honey beesBoth are eusocial, both store honey, both have queens and workers — and they have been evolving apart for something like eighty million years. Almost everything else differs.
- Meliponiculture: keeping stingless beesThe oldest managed beekeeping in the Americas, and a practice that is expanding fast in Southeast Asia. It looks almost nothing like keeping honey bees.
Tools for supporting this bee
- Plant recommendation tool
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- Bee-friendly garden planner
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- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?