Nest Architecture of Stingless Bees Divya K. K., Amritha V. S., Devanesan S. Department of Agricultural entomology, College of Agriculture, Vellayani, Thiruvananthapuram-695 522, Kerala Online published on 15 December, 2016. Abstract Stingless bees are most diverse eusocial bees abundantly seen in earth. Pollination is the one of major services contributed by the stingless bees to the world. Apart from this, they also provide various bee hive products like honey, propolis, pollen and wax with medicinal value. Their nests are usually seen in crevices of walls and hollow trunks of trees. They also exhibit extraordinary variation in the structure of nest within and among species. Major constituents of nest construction are cerumen or propolis, a mixture of wax with resins and gums. Other materials used are mud, vertebrate faeces, plant fibres and chewed leaf materials. Even though, a typical nest has the following parts-entrance tube, brood comb, involucrum, store pots, batumen, waste and resin dumps and the stingless bees were modifying these structures based on site of nest and other requirements. Exploration of this knowledge could be adopted in agricultural field for improving crop efficiency by their mass multiplication through domestication. Top Keywords Stingless bee, Cerumen, Propolis, Involucrum, Batumen. Top |