Stores a harvestable surplus
22 records
The bees that make honey in the sense everybody means. A very small group — the honey bees and several stingless bee genera — and the reason this site exists.
Bees by honey production
The axis that quietly does the most correcting on this site. Bumblebees make honey in the sense of ripened nectar stores — a few days' worth, in a wax pot, because an annual colony has no winter to survive. Stingless bees store real and harvestable quantities. Solitary bees make none at all, because there is no colony to feed.
4 groups · 110 records in the catalogue
Stores small quantities, occasionally harvested
9 records
Stores in quantities occasionally worth taking. Stingless bee honey is a genuinely different product with different chemistry, higher moisture and a sharper taste.
Keeps only a few days of stores
21 records
A few days of stores in wax pots. Bumblebees do make honey by any reasonable definition, and there is no point at which taking it would be worth doing.
Produces no honey
58 records
No honey at all. This is most bees: a solitary female provisions cells with pollen and nectar for her own larvae and there is no colony to feed through a winter.