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

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 %).