Hive propagation and resin foraging behaviour of the stingless bee Tetragonula carbonaria

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Wallace, Helen M

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Hosseini-Bai, Shahla

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2024-04-03
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Abstract

Stingless bees are important pollinators in natural, agricultural, and urban landscapes, and there are over 500 species of stingless bees in tropical and subtropical regions. Stingless bee colonies are increasingly in demand for crop pollination, and by hobbyist beekeepers. Propagation techniques such as hive splitting are being successfully used to multiply existing colonies to meet demand, however the impacts of hive splitting on colony foraging are largely unknown. Stingless bees are known to forage on a diversity of floral resources for pollen and nectar, however, knowledge of stingless bee foraging behaviour on another vital resource, resin, is lacking in comparison. Therefore, this thesis investigated how hive splitting impacts colony foraging on pollen, nectar and resin, and how long colony foraging takes to recover (Chapter 2). This thesis also investigated the resin foraging behaviour and resin sources collected by stingless bees (Tetragonula carbonaria) in two landscapes they commonly inhabit: forests (high resin diversity) and gardens (low resin diversity) (Chapter 3). Finally, this thesis explored the relative importance of extrinsic factors such as resource availability and intrinsic colony needs and preferences in determining the network complexity, network overlap and exclusivity of resin choices by stingless bee colonies within and between sites in high (forests) and low (gardens) resin diversity landscapes (Chapter 4). [...]

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Thesis (PhD Doctorate)

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Doctor of Philosophy

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School of Environment and Sc

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The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise.

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Subject

stingless bees

resin

propolis

pollination

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