Tetragonula bees

How to recognise it

Very small, typically 3 to 5 mm, dark brown to black, with clear wings held flat over the abdomen. Easily mistaken for a small fly or a winged ant at a glance.

• Tiny and dark, working flowers in numbers without ever appearing to sting anything.
• Nest entrance is a projecting tube or a resin-smeared hole, often sticky and sometimes decorated.
• Australian species build a distinctive flat spiral brood comb, visible the moment a hive is opened.

Body length 3–6 mm (typically 4 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

2,000–10,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Perennial, with colonies persisting for many years in a suitable cavity.

Winter

In the subtropical Australian range, colonies cluster and become inactive below about 18 °C — which is why sugarbag beekeeping does not extend far south.

Castes

Queen, Worker, Male

Nesting

Existing cavities and tubes; Resin-lined cavities; Tunnels excavated in wood

Nests in tree hollows, wall cavities and increasingly in purpose-built boxes. Brood is built as a flat horizontal spiral in several Australian species, which is unusual even among stingless bees and makes colony splitting straightforward.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

September to April

Year-round in the tropics; strongly seasonal at the southern Australian edge of the range, where colonies shut down through winter.

Lifecycle

1. 1Mass provisioningCells are provisioned and sealed before the egg develops, as in all stingless bees. The spiral comb is built outward from the centre and consumed from the oldest edge.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Tropical and subtropical forest, plantation, orchard and urban garden across the Indo-Pacific.

Distribution

India and Sri Lanka east through South-East Asia to New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and coastal Queensland and northern New South Wales.

Behaviour

Forages over a very short radius — often under 500 metres — which suits diverse smallholdings and makes the honey highly local. Recruits nestmates by scent trails rather than by a waggle dance.

Pollination role

Effective pollinators of macadamia, mango, lychee, coconut and a range of Southeast Asian orchard crops, and increasingly stocked deliberately for it. Their small size lets them work flowers a honey bee is too large to enter properly.

What it forages on

Broad generalists, but limited by flight range rather than by preference — a Tetragonula colony effectively samples a circle a few hundred metres wide.

Honey

Stores small quantities, occasionally harvested

Stores perhaps half a litre to a litre and a half a year in a managed box. That is a real harvest and a very small one, and it is why kelulut and sugarbag honey cost several times what Apis honey does.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Harvested by Aboriginal Australians for millennia as sugarbag, and the subject of a rapidly expanding commercial kelulut industry in Malaysia and Thailand since the 2000s.

Management

Kept in small wooden boxes designed to be split. Honey is drawn from individual pots by syringe or vacuum rather than spun, because there are no frames of comb to spin.

Conservation

Nest sites — hollow trees — are the limiting resource. In Australia, hollow-bearing trees take well over a century to form and are being removed faster than they are replaced.