Overview
Most bees in Australia are solitary, do not produce honey or wax, and lack a sting. The Australian bee fauna is dominated by one subfamily, Colletinae, to which most of the Australian genera and over half of the described species belong. All colletines are solitary nesting bees although some species will nest in aggregations. Brood chambers are made in the ground, termite mounds, or within dead twigs or rotten logs or stumps.
Exoneurella
(Xylocopini), an endemic Australian genus, is one of a few genera that are unique among bees in that brood cells are not constructed and provisioned. Instead larvae are all progressively fed together within hollow stems or wood tunnels created by other insects. The only native eusocial honeybees are the few species in
Austroplebia
and
Trigona
which are stingless and restricted to the tropical or subtropical regions of the continent. The other social bees present in Australia and New Zealand are the introduced European honey bee (
Apis melifera
) and large earth bumble bee (
Bombus terrestris
). Use of pollen and nectar as a protein source makes bees one of the most important pollinators of flowering plants and of considerable significance for habitat management and conservation. In Australia most native bees appear to be reliant largely on one plant family, Myrtaceae, which is the dominant plant group throughout most of Australia. Genera commonly visited by native bees include
Angophora, Baeckea, Callistemon, Eucalyptus, Eugenia, Leptospermum, Melaleuca
and
Tristania
.
Description
T
he bees are a large, commonly encountered group of Hymenoptera. In Australia there are more than 1,600 described species, with many more undescribed. In contrast, only about 40 species are described from New Zealand. Bees range considerably in size (2-40 mm) and are characterised by their stout hairy bodies with branched (plumose) hairs, often part of the hind leg modified for collecting and carrying pollen, and their habit of visiting flowers. The bees have previously been treated as five to 11 separate families (Naumann 1991; Michener 2000). However, here we follow Melo and Goncalves (2005) and treat them as a single family, with the seven families of Michener (2000) reduced in rank to subfamilies.
The Apidae family contains the subfamilies Anthophoridae, Ctenoplectridae, Megachilidae, Colletidae, Stenotritidae, and Halictidae.
Further information about the Apidae can be found in Melo & Goncalves 2005, Michener 1965, Michener 2000 and Naumann 1991.