Dwarf honeybee
| Dwarf honeybee | ||||||||||||
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Dwarf honey bee ( Apis florea ) |
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| Systematics | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Apis florea | ||||||||||||
| Fabricius , 1787 |
The dwarf honey bee ( Apis florea ) is one of the eight species from the genus of honey bees ( Apis ) found in Asia . It was described by Johann Christian Fabricius as early as 1787 .
Distribution area
Their distribution area extends from Oman to the Indonesian islands. In the eighties of the twentieth century dwarf honey bees were introduced to Sudan , in the early nineties they were also detected in Iraq .
description
The dwarf honey bee has two brick-red bands on the abdomen, the other segments are black with white horizontal stripes. The bee is about half the size of the honey bee. The colony only grows a single, palm-sized honeycomb in the open air on a branch, at the upper end of which there is a horizontal platform that is used for the typical waggle dance . The colonies can contain up to 20,000 individuals. The drones of the world's second smallest honey bee species (only the dwarf bush bee is even smaller ) mainly fly at lunchtime.
Specialty
When a colony of dwarf honey bees becomes wisecracking, i.e. H. loses its queen, workers from foreign colonies use the opportunity and join them to produce drones with their genetic material in this people. This is facilitated by the construction of the honeycomb outdoors. Such a parasitization of queensless colonies does not occur with the western honey bee .
literature
- Friedrich Ruttner: Natural history of honey bees . Franckh Kosmos Verlag, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-440-09125-2
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Mogbel AA El-Niweiri, Robin FA Moritz, H. Michael G. Lattorff: The Invasion of the Dwarf Honeybee, Apis florea, along the River Nile in Sudan . In: Insects . tape 10 , no. 11 , November 15, 2019, doi : 10.3390 / insects10110405 .