Abstract:
Stingless bees are large group of social bees belong to subfamily Meliponinae in the family Apidae and closely related to honeybees. Honey of stingless bee is prized as a medicine in many African communities including Ethiopia. This study focused on exploring the indigenous knowledge of stingless bee’s management and honey production along with identifying the factors determine their nesting habitats, identify the available food resources for the stingless bees in wag-lasta areas of Amhara region. Combinations of simple random sampling and purposive sampling techniques were used for the selection of the peasant association and sample respondents to collect primary data. Quantitative data were collected and analyzed using simple descriptive statistics (SPSS version 20). In the other way, presence of little knowledge of extension experts about stingless bee rearing, Poor awareness of farmers on the importance of domestication and honey harvesting of stingless bee and absence of trust to share the indigenous practice among the farmers, absence of appropriate technologies and materials, for rearing stingless bee and low amount of honey produced by stingless bees were identified as a major constraints affecting domestication of stingless in the area stingless the nest dimension in three agro- ecological zones, it was significantly higher (p ˂ 0.001) in mid land than that of low land in addition the width of nest dimension is significantly higher than low land (p ˂ 0.045) more over the height of nest dimension in mid land is significantly higher(p ˂ 0.004) than low land
There is significant difference in the number of batumen layer but there is no significant difference in batumen thickness among the agro ecologies with higher at mid and high land Nest designs differ with species as well as the habitats. the mean of across AEZ there were none significant difference in brood comp width p>0.6 but there were a significant difference the number of brood comb and brood comb length p˂0.001.Nests were found in mud walls, traditional hives, in soils. Nine stingless bee nests per district a total of 27 nests were excavated to measure batumen, invuecurum, pollen pot, honey pot, were measured with 0.01 calipers.
Keywords: Indigenous, knowledge, stingless bee, management, nest.