An unusually large and persistent male swarm of the stingless bee Tetragonula laeviceps in Thailand (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini)

Abstract

At an entrance of a nest of Tetragonula laeviceps (Smith) located in Chiang Mai University campus we observed a male swarm that lasted for at least 40 consecutive days and contained more than 7000 males each time on several days. Surprisingly, harvesting the day’s totality of males did not reduce the swarm size on the following day, thus indicating that most males swarmed only one day, at the end of which they presumably perished from exhaustion away from the nest. Males of other species were also found in the swarm, a behavior corroborated by previous observations with other species elsewhere in Thailand.