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Aussie Bee Photograph Gallery

The Domino Cuckoo Bee (Thyreus lugubris) sipping honey from a feeder during a native bee experiment. The dramatically coloured polka-dot cuckoo bees sneak into the nests of blue banded bees and teddy bear bees and lay their eggs inside the nests.

Showcasing the Beauty of Australian Native Bees © 2007 Australian Native Bee Research Centre, PO Box 74, North Richmond NSW 2754 Australia Aussie Bee Website: www.aussiebee.com.au Aussie Bee Photograph Gallery • Australia has over 1,500 species of “true blue” native bees. • Native bees can be black, yellow, red, blue or even metallic green. They can be fat and furry, or sleek and shiny. • The smallest bee in the world is a yellow bee, less than 2 mm long, from Cape York, Queensland. • Australiaʼs largest bee is a furry, 24 mm, yellow and black carpenter bee that looks like a bumble bee. • Most Australian native bees are solitary and raise their young in burrows in the ground or inside twigs. • Australia also has 10 species of social native bees which make delicious honey and do not sting! • Australiaʼs spectacularly coloured native bees are important pollinators of our unique wildﬂowers.

Two blue banded bees, sleeping nose to nose, in a greenhouse tomato experiment. One bee has been marked with a dab of non-toxic pink paint so that the researchers could follow her activities inside the greenhouse.

Learn More About Native Bees! Visit the Aussie Bee website for photos and information on native bees. Information booklets, Australiaʼs ﬁrst and only ﬁeld guide and a video on stingless beekeep- ing are also available from the Aussie Bee website.

Blue banded bees (Amegilla) show potential as pollinators of greenhouse tomatoes. Ideal pollination of tomato ﬂowers requires a bee that can perform ʻbuzz pollinationʼ. Here a blue banded bee grasps a tomato ﬂower inside a greenhouse in preparation to buzz pollinating it.

Seven blue banded bees (Amegilla) asleep on a stem at dusk

A teddy bear bee (Amegilla) taking a rest from her foraging by grasping a stem with her jaws. Teddy bear bees build tiny solitary nests in burrows in the ground.

Like the blue banded bees, teddy bear bees can also gather pollen by buzz pollinating ﬂowers. Here a teddy bear bee buzz pollinates a Solanum ﬂower.

This tiny masked bee is one of the hundreds of solitary bees in the family Colletidae. They nest in pre-existing holes in timber. The hole that this masked bee has adopted was used last season by a solitary native wasp which had sealed the entrance of the hole with cream coloured mud. Now this masked bee has taken over the vacated wasp nest for her own home.

Resin bees (Megachile) also nest in pre-existing holes in timber. This bee is sealing the front entrance of her nest with resin mixed with some chewed up leaves. Aussie Bee has made many artiﬁcial nest sites for these bees by drilling holes in blocks of timber and the local resin bees use them enthusiastically.

These carpenter bees (Xylocopa) are often mistaken for bumblebees. However, bumblebees come from Europe and elsewhere overseas. There is a feral population of bumblebees in Tasmania but we do not have any bumblebees on the Australian mainland. Carpenter bees cut burrows for their nests in soft timber such as dead mango boughs.

This is a group of worker bees on the brood comb of an Austroplebeia australis stingless bee nest. They are surrounding their queen bee with her large abdomen swollen with eggs. Austroplebeia bees do not enclose their brood chamber with as many resinous layers as the Trigona bees do. So it is easier to observe the fascinating behaviour of the queen as she lays her eggs.

Trigona carbonaria stingless bees build an elegant spiral brood comb. In this species, the worker bees build new cells on the brood comb in large batches. When all the cells are ﬁnished the queen quickly moves around and lays an egg in each cell. The bases of over 20 new brood cells, being built on the edges of the combs, can be seen in this photograph.