Recently I had been doing some honey extraction and had noticed that both my honeybees (Apis mellifera) and native bees (Tetragonula carbonaria – formerly:Trigona carbonaria) had been collecting some of the left-over honey in the containers I had used. Purely based on anecdotal evidence, I would even go so far as to argue that the native bees seemed to be faster at finding the honey than the honey bees! On closer inspection I found this: a native bee biting the wing of a honeybee. You really get a sense of the size difference between these two species from this picture. The tiny native bee had completely incapacitated the larger honeybee, which was unable to fly or rid itself of its attacker.
Australian native bee biting honey bee
Trigona carbonaria biting the wing of a honey bee
Jack Simpson
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