By Brandon Specktor, Senior
Writer | January 22, 2018 03:03pm ET
The Australian stingless
bee Tetragonula carbonaria is
not your average pollinator. For starters, out of about 20,000 known bee
species in the world, T.
carbonaria is one of only 500 without stingers.
That's not to say this bee is
defenseless. Invasive beetles that have tried to infiltrate T. carbonaria nests have found
themselves suddenly covered in a brew of wax, mud and plant resin —
effectively mummified
alive by bees. T.
carbonaria colonies have also been observed waging days-long territory wars against
their stingless neighbors, resulting in hundreds of bee-on-bee
casualties and queens unceremoniously dethroned.
This is all to say, if you had a
home like T. carbonaria's, you'd
probably fight for it, too. As seen in a popular photo posted to
Reddit last week, swarms of T. carbonaria rear their young in mesmerizing, spiral-shaped
towers called brood combs, linking hundreds of individual egg chambers together
into a continuous staircase of unborn baby bees. [Here's
What Wasp Faces Look Like Up-Close]
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