Native Bees

I attended a native bee workshop this morning.  There are around 1700 species of bees in Australia, most are solitary but there are some that live in communities similar to the common commercial species.

These are Tetragonula carbonaria and they are small and stingless.  They don't produce near the amount of honey as commercial bees.  The woman extracted I guess around 200mls from this hive and that was produced since October.  The main benefit is the pollination capability.

I used to have bees with a friend but they ended up producing too much honey.  These seemed very interesting.