Bees...

Australia has endemic stingless bees... and now we have some in our yard. Tetragonula carbonaria are not the European Honey Bees that most people know... they are much smaller and don't have stingers. In the Sydney region, T. carbonaria is at the southern end of its range as they only forage for food at temperatures above 18 °C. Keen observers of this blog will know that for a reasonable period of the year we experience outdoor temperatures below 18 °C. They also do not like temperatures above 38 °C.

Outdoor temperature from August 2018 through the end of 2022. You can see that we had a few days in January 2020 that would have been too hot for the bees. 

Outdoor temperature from August 2018 through December 2022. The green zone (18 - 38 °C) are temperatures at which the bees will forage. They will have very high mortality at temperatures below 0 °C or above 42 °C.




Bees

Bees returning to the hive after visiting flowers... The entry to the hive box is through a 1/2 in irrigation pipe elbow, so you can see that the bees are very small.

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