STUDIES ON STINGLESS BEE, Tetragonula spp. DISTRIBUTION AND BEE PASTURE
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Date
2021-02
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University of Horticultural Sciences, Bagalkot. (College of Horticulture, Bagalkot).
Abstract
A roving survey on distribution of stingless bee, Tetragonula spp. was
conducted at different districts of Northern Karnataka and samples were collected to
study the morphometric characters, molecular characterization and bee pasture. These
studies were carried out at College of Horticulture, Udyanagiri and Haveli campus
Bagalkot during 2019-2020. Stingless bee colonies were widely distributed in all the
surveyed districts namely Bagalkot, Ballari, Belagavi, Dharwad, Koppal and
Vijayapura. And they were located in the hallows of stone and mud walls, tree trunks,
junctions of wooden beams of doors and windows. However, wall cavities offered
excellent nesting site for most of the colonies observed in different districts. Stingless
bees collected from different districts of Northern Karnataka varied in some
morphometric characters. Most of the morphometric characters (head width, antennal
length, lapping tongue length, thorax length, thorax width, forewing length, hind tibial
length and abdomen width) of stingless bees recorded highest from Dharwad whereas,
stingless bees collected from Vijayapura district recorded lowest. The number of
hamuli were five across all the collected samples and the colour of bees varied from
black (Dharwad and Belagavi) to brown. Further, DNA sequencing revealed that
stingless bees from different districts of Northern Karnataka were homologous as
compared with species obtained from the NCBI GeneBank. But the bootstrap values
in between the species were low. So, further investigation is required to depict the
relationships among the stingless bee species before revealing a comprehensive
conclusion.
Visual observations depicted that stingless bees foraged on 30 different plant
species categorized under 20 different families of which most preferred families were
Apiaceae, Fabaceae, Asteraceae, Amaryllidaceae, Anacardiaceae and Euphorbiaceae.
Further, in our study the pollen analysis was achieved by the standard method of
acetolysis. In which a total of 11 pollen loads were collected from corbicula of
stingless bees during January to March 2020 and identified 9 plant species belonged
to 8 different families. Out of which, royal palm and mango were most occurred
pollen types. These observations reveal that the stingless bees are dependent on
diversified food sources in the nature.