Mating behaviour of A.australis
Written by Dean Haley
Unusual mating behaviour of A.australis has been observed by Allan Beil of QLD Australia. Allan has hundreds of australis colonies in glass topped boxes set up for observation.
Unlike other species of stingless bees in Australia, australis queens appear to mate in the box and with multiple drones.
Source: Ken Walker Museum Victoria
Having australis mating in the box is a bit of a big deal. Mating with your own brother is never a good idea because of inbreeding and most species go to great lengths to avoid that. In bees, mating with your own brother can lead to “Diploid Drones”. Diploid drones are a drain on society and are normally sterile. If australis are mating in the box for multiple generations how on Earth do they avoid this? No one knows.
The segment of video below shows a virgin queen about about 1 to 2 days old. The orange tailed queen is held down by worker bees and a crowd of workers surround her and tap with their antennas. Two clear matings are seen at 1 minute 40 and 3 minutes 20 of the video. At the end of the video the queen escapes!
Bonus video
John Klumpp has observed in Allan beil’s Australis mating video 0042 what seems to be the queen laying an egg.
Have a look very interesting.
SCIENCE STUFF
We can not know for sure that these videos and observations are what they appear to be without some scientific scrutiny and DNA tests. This would be a great project for a University genetics department. A previous study was conducted in Australia (Palmer KA et al. 2002) but did not look at australis.
Studies overseas have shown that some stingless bees do mate in the box and don’t require a mating flight (Camargo 1972, Sakagami & Laroca 1963).
Multiple matings in stingless bees have also been reported (Sakagami & Laroca 1963, Paxton RJ et al. 1999).
The worker bees in the video tapping with their antennae are likely to be tasting or smelling the virgin queens pheromones to decide if she will be accepted for the job of laying queen in the colony. This type of behaviour may be relatively common in stingless bees (Imperatriz-Fonesca & R Zuchi 1995).
REFERENCES
Not Only Single Mating in Stingless Bees. Paxton RJ, Weisschuh N, Engels W, Hartfelder K. (Naturwissenschafter March 1999).Additional Observations on the Habits of the Cleptobiotic Stingless Bees, Genus Lestrimelitta Friese. Sakagami SF & Laroca S. 1963.Detection of Diploid Males in a Natural Colony of the Cleptobiotic Bee Lestrimellita sp. Taures MG, Carvalho CR, Soares FAF, Fernandes A. (Genetics and molecular biology, 2010).VI Imperatriz-Fonesca, R Zucchi. Virgin Queens in Stingless Bee Colonies: a review. Apidologue, Springer verlag, 1995.
It is great to have someone with the enthusiam and passion to pursue these topics, and present them to the general public. Alan’s deep knowledge of Austroplebeia has slipped under the general radar for too long. One can only hope it will spark a new interest in just what is happening within those boxes in their yards, to encourage the cameras to be brought out to record what is seen, and above all, to ask questions.
Bob Luttrell
Hi Bob and welcome. It’s nice to have someone new post a comment and I hope you check out a few of the other posts on this site. Check out the Alan Beil interview. Maybe Nick will interview you one day soon?
Nick and I are trying to share the love of bees and promote easy viewing hives with clear inspection panels. It’s crazy that so many families own stingless bees but hardly ever get to see inside. Photos and learning will come, it’s an exciting time.
I have a little box I have set up to try and take some photos of my own. I realized my phone needs about 20cm depth of view to focus properly so I’ve got a narrow 20cm deep box. I transferred an australis queen cell on 17th March, it hatched on 23rd March and I’ve been hoping and hoping I could see her mate in the box. For what it’s worth I think she may have mated this morning (27 March) and I got very very bad video so not happy with that.
Thanks for the feedback,
Dean
Hi Dean
As most people take photos with mobile phones these days, perhaps a worthwhile subject would infact be a guide on how to get the best photos. That is coming from someone who today had the chance of getting an image of a queen walking over a queen cell in a T hockingsi colony, only to curse the reflections that I could not avoid in the time I had
Bob
It’s now 4 months since my queen hatched in my little box and she has not mated or layed eggs.
I have added more brood on a couple of occasions to keep bee numbers up, and I’ve been feeding sugar syrup. I keep them inside and empty their garbage occasionally. It’s been very interesting keeping this tiny hive going but it hasn’t proved internal mating.
It’s now my plan to hatch a second queen and try again in spring time. Question is, what do I do with this little queen? I wonder if I let her out can she still fly and mate after all these months?
I posted a video of a Hoskingsi queen inspecting cells and laying eggs on youtube. This was a recently budded hive, an endoscope camera (approx $75 at supercheap) was used to capture the video. Unfortunately the video has been marked as adult only content, so I don’t think many have seen it.
Would love to see that. Have you got a link? You can write to YouTube and ask it to be unblocked.
You don’t suppose that foreign drones enter the hive?
I have seen a drone swarm where multiple hives are involved this may be the way they cross to get genetic variation. At the time this was happening a group of guards stand around the entrance and push as many drones out as they can. Maybe only the strong ones are able to enter.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WqABZX4Q8lM
Very interesting video!!! I can see the super busy behavior they show when a queen is out and about. Great capture