Last year the City of Sydney council sponsored native stingless bee hives for community gardens. We were lucky to be one of the recipients for such a hive. Unfortunately the hive was too weak and did not survive the winter.
The council kindly offered us a new hive which arrived this week and the bees couldn’t wait to get out and start exploring their new home.
“Native stingless bees” is a term covering the around 12 species of native bees found in Australia. Most of them are tropical species. But the Tetragonula carbonaria also live and survive along the eastern coast all the way down to Sydney and is the only species of native bees that can be kept here.
Each hive or nest has a queen, drones and thousands of workers. These bees produce sugarbag honey, a highly prized food of Aborigines who gathered it from wild nests. The brood of the TC bees form a very particular spiral pattern.
These bees do not have a stinger like the European honey bees and are therefore save to approach and even have them land on you.
