Resin-lined cavities

Bees that nest this way. Nesting habit decides what a garden has to provide — bare sunny soil, dead wood, hollow stems or nothing at all — and it is the half of bee conservation that flower lists leave out.

17 records · nesting habit

Stingless beesMeliponiniThe other honey-making bees, and the only serious rival to Apis for that title. Stingless bees are tropical, perennial and genuinely eusocial, and they store honey in clusters of egg-shaped wax-and-resin pots rather than in hexagonal comb. Their honey is different enough from Apis honey — wetter, more acidic, sharper, prone to fermenting — that several countries have had to write separate standards for it. They have been kept by people in Mesoamerica, Australia, Africa and South-East Asia for thousands of years, in traditions entirely independent of European beekeeping.
Orchid beesEuglossiniBrilliant metallic green, gold and blue bees of the neotropical forest, and the only bees that collect perfume. Male orchid bees gather volatile aromatic compounds from orchids, fungi and rotting wood, store them in hollow chambers in their swollen hind legs, and use the resulting blend in courtship — a behaviour with no parallel anywhere else in the animal kingdom, and one that hundreds of orchid species have evolved to exploit.
Wallace's giant beeMegachile plutoThe largest bee in the world — a female has a wingspan of around six centimetres and jaws like a stag beetle — and one of the rarest. It nests inside occupied termite mounds in the Indonesian Moluccas, lining a chamber with resin to keep the termites out. It was described by Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, not seen again for over a century, rediscovered in 1981, lost again, and photographed alive for the first time only in 2019.
Mayan stingless beeMelipona beecheiiThe bee the Maya kept for two thousand years before anyone brought a honey bee to the Americas, and one whose management came embedded in a religious and calendrical framework rather than an agricultural one. Xunan kab — the royal lady — is a stingless bee kept in hollow log hives sealed at both ends, and its honey is thin, tart and used as medicine as much as food. The tradition very nearly ended, and its revival is as much cultural recovery as beekeeping.
Australian stingless beeTetragonula carbonariaAustralia's social native bee, kept in boxes by a growing number of hobbyists and used commercially to pollinate macadamia. It builds a brood comb in a rising spiral — a genuinely beautiful structure unlike anything else in the bee world — stores honey in separate resin pots, and produces a tart, medicinal honey that Aboriginal Australians have harvested as sugarbag for many thousands of years.
Vulture beesTrigona hypogea and allied speciesThe only bees in the world that eat meat. Three Neotropical stingless bee species have given up pollen altogether and provision their nests with carrion instead, landing on dead animals, cutting flesh with specialised teeth, and carrying it home to be processed into a protein store. They have lost the pollen baskets their relatives use and gained a gut microbiome closer to a vulture's than to a bee's.
Giant resin beeMegachile sculpturalisA very large east Asian megachild that has established across North America and Europe within two decades, and one of the few solitary bees anywhere to become a genuine invasion concern. It nests in existing cavities, seals them with resin, and has been recorded forcibly evicting native carpenter bees from their tunnels — which is unusual behaviour and the main reason it is watched.
Resin beesHeriadesTiny, cylindrical, near-black mason-bee relatives that gather sticky plant resin to seal their nests, and which specialise almost entirely on composites. They use very fine cavities, they have disproportionately large heads for their size, and a nest sealed with a shining resin plug is the sign they have been there.
Melipona beesMeliponaThe large stingless bees of the American tropics, and the ones worth keeping for honey. Melipona are honey bee sized or bigger, build substantial colonies, and store enough surplus that a hive can be harvested annually without ruining it — which is why every major indigenous beekeeping tradition in the Americas is built on this genus rather than on the smaller meliponines around it.
Tetragonula beesTetragonulaThe small stingless bees of Asia and Australia, and the genus behind both the Malaysian kelulut industry and Australian sugarbag honey. They are tiny — often three or four millimetres — and they build spiral brood combs and elaborate resin nest entrances that are frequently the easiest way to find them.
Scaptotrigona beesScaptotrigonaThe populous and pugnacious stingless bees of Mesoamerica. Scaptotrigona colonies run to tens of thousands of workers rather than the few hundred typical of Melipona, and they defend themselves vigorously — which makes them a very different animal to keep, and a considerably more productive one.
African stingless beesMeliponulaThe least documented stingless bees on earth. Africa has its own meliponine genera, harvested across the equatorial belt for honey valued well above Apis honey, and they are known largely from museum specimens and from the people who harvest them rather than from research.
JataíTetragonisca angustulaThe most widely kept stingless bee in the Americas and the easiest to recognise — a small golden bee with a wax entrance tube guarded by soldiers that hover in the air outside it, which almost no other bee does.
KelulutHeterotrigona itamaThe bee behind Southeast Asia's stingless honey industry. Heterotrigona itama is larger than most Asian meliponines, takes readily to log and box hives, and produces enough honey to have supported an industry that barely existed before 2000 and now has its own national standard in Malaysia.
UruçuMelipona scutellarisThe large stingless bee of northeastern Brazil's Atlantic forest, and the species most Brazilian meliponiculture in the region is built around. Colonies are strong by meliponine standards, which is what makes commercial production possible at all.
JandaíraMelipona subnitidaThe stingless bee of the Brazilian caatinga, adapted to a semi-arid thorn forest where the flowering follows the rains and the dry season can last most of a year. Smaller than uruçu, and the species most caatinga meliponiculture is built on.
Robber stingless beesLestrimelittaThe stingless bees that gather no food of their own. Lestrimelitta have lost the pollen-carrying apparatus entirely and live by raiding other meliponine nests — a whole genus of eusocial bees that has abandoned foraging, and the clearest possible demonstration that being a stingless bee does not mean producing honey worth harvesting.

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