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Products made by bees are well-known for their beneficial properties and nutritional value. This association has been proven by scientific studies that describe their composition and biological activities. The aim of this study is to portray the state of the art on research regarding stingless bee honey. The search for standards that guide the trade of these products is still portrayed as a future perspective, since there are significant differences in relation to honey from Apis mellifera and it often requires additional treatments.

International audience; AbstractWe studied the relationship between worker longevity and the age of foraging onset in the bee Melipona fasciculata, as well as the longevity oscillation in the rainy and dry seasons. Workers that emerged in the rainy season started to forage later and lived at least 50 % longer than foragers from the dry season. In both periods, a higher longevity was observed in workers that started to forage earlier in life but did not forage all days of their careers. We also showed, by using a Weibull model, that workers experienced higher mortalities at older ages in the rainy season, but the same model did not fit with the data from the dry season. This lack of fit in the dry season can be explained by the high mortality of workers that did not start to forage in this season and to other intrinsic factors of the colonies. Thus, the age of foraging onset and internal colonial factors must be considered in studies examining worker longevity in free-foraging colonies in this diverse group of eusocial bees.

International audience; Stingless bees are a diverse group of highly eusocial tropical bees and potential pollinators of natural and crop environments. Nevertheless, large-scale breeding for agricultural purposes still needs development. A bottleneck is the small number of queens generally found in the colonies of most species. A proposed solution is to develop in vitro rearing of stingless bee queens, which includes a technical support due to the massive liquid feeding of larvae. In this study, we tested the efficacy of in vitro queen-rearing techniques in terms of queen size, survival, and fecundity. We found that humidity must be kept high during the first 6 days of larval development and reduced thereafter to 75 %. In the most effective treatments, we obtained up to 97.9 % queen survival. We also found that queens not different in size from natural queens could be produced if sufficient larval food is provided. In vitro queens were able to mate and lay viable eggs. This methodology is also useful for several research appliances, like pesticide effect on bees, pollen quality effect in caste determination, and the use of genetic sources for selection programs, among others.

International audience; Most stingless bee species build their nests inside tree hollows. In this paper, we present trap-nest containers which simulate nesting cavities so as to attract swarms of stingless bees. Although regularly used by stingless bee beekeepers in Brazil, this technique to obtain new colonies has not yet been systematically studied. We used two different types of trap-nests (plastic and cardboard) of four different sizes (0.5, 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 L) containing propolis extract and wax. Over a period of 2 years, 61 swarms of nine different stingless bee species were attracted to the trap-nests. Most swarms chose the largest container (3 L); swarms were collected mostly in springtime (October–December). The plastic containers were more successfully occupied than others by stingless bee swarms. Trap-nests are a viable tool for stingless beekeepers, researchers and conservation biologists to obtain and study stingless bee colonies.

Stingless bees are highly eusocial bees, and are characterised by having perennial colonies that are typically headed by one single-mated queen (Peters et al., 1999). The main exception to this pattern is found in Melipona bicolor, which is the only stingless bee species discovered so far to exhibit facultative polygyny, whereby several queens may coexist and share reproduction inside the colony for considerable periods of time (Bego, 1989; Velthuis et al., 2006). Aside from that, there are, for a few stingless bee species, also some anecdotal reports of temporary, transient episodes of polygyny (e.g. in M. scutellaris, Carvalho-Zilse and Kerr, 2004; Plebeia droryana, Silva, 1972; and P. wittmanni, Witter and Wittmann, 1997), which are usually associated with queen replacement events. Here we report on a novel case of occasional polygyny in the stingless bee M. quadrifasciata, in which an exceptionally high number (8) of egg-laying queens were found to coexist inside the same colony. In addition, and in contrast to some of the earlier studies demonstrating occasional polygyny in stingless bees, which were purely based on observations, we provide the first genetic data about the reproductive partitioning and relatedness among these different queens. ispartof: Apidologie vol:42 issue:2 pages:211-213 status: published