Giant honey bee

How to recognise it

Much larger than a western honey bee, at around 17-20 mm, with a golden-brown thorax and a dark abdomen banded in pale gold at the tip. The nest is the more reliable identification: a single sheet of comb up to a metre and a half across, hanging in the open with a living curtain of bees covering it several layers deep.

• Substantially larger than any other honey bee — noticeably bigger than a European honey bee in flight.
• The nest is a single exposed comb hanging from a branch or rock face, never in a cavity.
• The comb is covered by a dense curtain of bees, which performs a rippling defensive display when disturbed.
• Found only in south and southeast Asia.

Body length 17–20 mm (typically 18 mm).

Biology

Social organisation

Eusocial, colony survives the winter

Overlapping generations, division of labour, and a colony that persists through winter as a cluster. Honey bees, and the reason they store honey at all.

Colony size at peak

20,000–100,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Several years, though a colony may abandon and rebuild its nest repeatedly as it migrates.

Winter

No winter to overwinter through. Instead the colony migrates seasonally — sometimes several hundred kilometres — following flowering, and abandons the nest entirely to do it.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Drones

Nesting

Wax comb in a cavity

Builds a single vertical sheet of comb in the open, suspended from a high branch, a cliff overhang or occasionally a building. There is no cavity and no enclosure; the bees themselves are the wall. A single tualang tree in Malaysia can carry over a hundred separate nests, and the same nest sites are reused across generations.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Active year-round, with movement rather than dormancy as the response to seasonal scarcity.

Lifecycle

1. 1Colony establishmentA migrating swarm selects a site — typically a high, smooth-barked branch that predators cannot climb — and builds a single comb, which the colony then covers.
2. 2Build-up and harvestThe colony stores honey in the upper part of the comb and raises brood below. A strong nest can hold tens of kilograms of honey.
3. 3MigrationAs local flowering ends the colony abandons the nest and migrates, often to a traditional seasonal site. It will rebuild from nothing on arrival. No other honey bee does this at comparable scale.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Tropical and subtropical forest, plantation and open country in south and southeast Asia, from sea level to moderate altitude.

Distribution

India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Behaviour

Migratory, defensive and highly organised. The shimmering display is a genuine collective behaviour: individual bees flip their abdomens upward in sequence, producing a wave that travels across the comb face and visibly deters hornets. Colonies also forage at night under bright moonlight, which very few bees do.

Pollination role

An extremely important wild pollinator across tropical Asia, and one that cannot be replaced by managed bees because it cannot be managed. Its long foraging range — over ten kilometres in some studies — means a single colony services a very large area, including forest trees that shorter-ranging bees never reach.

Very high, through a combination of colony size, foraging range and the ability to work at night.

What it forages on

Broadly generalist across tropical forest and agricultural flora, with an exceptional foraging range that lets it exploit widely scattered resources.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

Stores substantial quantities — a large nest may hold twenty kilograms or more — and it is harvested throughout its range by traditional honey hunting. The honey is typically higher in moisture than temperate honey because it ripens in humid air, which is why it ferments readily and is often dried after harvest.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

One of the oldest continuous relationships between people and bees anywhere. Honey hunting from Apis dorsata nests is depicted in rock art across India and southeast Asia and is still practised, with climbers ascending fifty metres at night using rope and smoke. In several Malaysian and Indian communities the harvest carries ritual and song, and access to particular trees is held by families.

Management

Cannot be hived. Every serious attempt has failed, because the species requires an open nest site and migrates. Where it is 'managed' at all it is by protecting nest trees and regulating harvest — a conservation relationship rather than a husbandry one.

Conservation

Declining across much of its range with deforestation, since it needs both large emergent nest trees and continuous flowering across a wide area. Loss of a single traditional nest tree can displace scores of colonies at once.