
Austroplebeia is a stingless bee (Meliponini) genus in the family Apidae. The genus was erected by Jesus Santiago Moure in 1961. The genus comprises five described species endemic to Australia and New Guinea. Austroplebeia are more closely related to the African stingless bees than rest of the species found in Asia and Australia.
Australian Austral-Stingless Bee
GENUS
via GBIF
Austroplebeia is a stingless bee (Meliponini) genus in the family Apidae. The genus was erected by Jesus Santiago Moure in 1961. The genus comprises five described species endemic to Australia and New Guinea. Austroplebeia are more closely related to the African stingless bees than rest of the species found in Asia and Australia.
The species of Austroplebeia are difficult to separate reliably by body size or morphology except for A. cincta which can be distinguished readily by its colouration and pilosity. There are also few differences in their nest structures. This has hindered taxonomic studies to date and no workable key exists for the Austroplebeia species.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).