Discovery of Graphene Sheets and C-Rich Micro-Oval structure in Stingless Bee Hive; Leading to an Emergent Material with Debut of Blue Emission

TL;DR

This study characterizes stingless bee hive material, revealing embedded graphene sheets and micro-oval structures, and reports a novel blue emission property observed through photoluminescence spectroscopy.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of bee hive material showing graphene presence and introduces a new blue emission feature.

Findings

Graphene sheets and micro-oval structures are identified in bee hive material.

Presence of graphene confirmed by multiple characterization techniques.

Blue emission with specific decay times observed in photoluminescence analysis.

Abstract

Naturally produced stingless bee hive (NP-SBH) is an intricately produced material by the combination of waxes, resin and other biological materials that offers protection and structural stability to the bee colony. This study explores a detailed analysis of Indian stingless bee hive material using multi-characterization techniques approach to evaluate their morphological, ultrastructural, chemical composition and their crystallinity. FESEM reveal uniformly distributed micro-oval structures along with graphene sheets throughout the observed region. Furthermore, Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (EDAX) provides the richness of carbon (C) in graphene as well as in the micro-oval structure. HRTEM gives an insight about the internal ultrastructure and arrangement of atoms in the sample which revealed the presence of multiple graphene sheets. The ring shape electron diffraction pattern and high resolution lattice fringes provide the arrangement of carbon atoms, with interlayer spacing (d) value 3.4 {\AA}, well agreed with that of graphene. Furthermore, X-ray Diffraction (XRD) and Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy support the presence of graphene. As a debut, we observe blue emission from PL spectroscopy with decay times 1.18 ns (42 %) and 5.41 ns (58 %).