Foraging performance of stingless bee, Tetragonula iridipennis Smith (Hymenoptera: Apidae) during winter season in Madurai, Tamil Nadu

Abstract

A study on foraging activity of stingless bees was conducted at Insectary of Department of Agricultural Entomology, Agricultural College and Research Institute, Madurai, Tamil Nadu, India to study the seasonal foraging activity of stingless bee during winter under the influence of climatic factors viz., temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, wind speed etc. The objective of this study was to investigate the active period of foraging in winter. The foraging activities consist of the total number of outgoing foragers, incoming foragers with pollen load and incoming foragers without pollen load were observed from December 2017 to February 2018. The average bee activity was recorded high during the morning hours between 6.00 am to 12.00 pm with maximum of 66.92 bees/5 min. The total bee activity was recorded highest during the 5th and 8th standard week of 130.63 and 135.35 numbers of bees/5 min, respectively. The maximum pollen gatherer was observed during 5th standard week (18.28 bees/5 min). The study revealed that both maximum temperature and wind speed has positive correlation with foraging behavior of outgoing bees, incoming bees and incoming bees with pollen (r = 0.72, r = 0.73, r = 0.84 respectively). The average weather parameters prevailed during this study period was maximum temperature of 32.05 °C and minimum of 20.07 °C, relative humidity of 64.30%, rainfall of 1.52 mm and wind velocity of 1.30 kmph.