Jandaíra

How to recognise it

Medium for a Melipona at 7 to 9 mm, dark with yellowish markings and a relatively slender build.

• Small mud-rimmed entrance in a hollow trunk or a managed box.
• Smaller and less hairy than uruçu, with which it shares the region.

Body length 6–10 mm (typically 8 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

300–2,500 individuals

Colony lifespan

Perennial.

Winter

No winter, but a genuinely severe dry season — colonies reduce activity sharply and live on stores for months, which is closer to temperate overwintering than most tropical bees get.

Castes

Queen, Worker, Male

Nesting

Existing cavities and tubes; Resin-lined cavities

Nests in hollow caatinga trees, which are small and increasingly scarce — the species is directly limited by cavity availability.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Year-round in principle, but genuinely seasonal in practice — activity tracks the rains closely.

Lifecycle

1. 1Dry-season dormancyColonies contract sharply through the long caatinga dry season, reducing brood rearing and living on stored honey and pollen for months.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Caatinga dry thorn forest and its agricultural margins.

Distribution

Rio Grande do Norte, Ceará, Paraíba and the wider Brazilian northeast.

Behaviour

Very short foraging radius, and highly responsive to rainfall — colonies build rapidly when the caatinga flowers and shut down when it does not.

Pollination role

An important pollinator of caatinga flora, including cactus and several endemic species, and one of the few pollinators active in a landscape that is empty for much of the year.

Honey

Stores a harvestable surplus

A few litres a year in a good season and nothing at all in a drought, which makes the income genuinely precarious.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Kept across the Brazilian northeast as a smallholder income, and promoted specifically because it requires no land clearance.

Management

Kept in boxes and propagated by division; harvested after the rains.

Conservation

Threatened by caatinga clearance and by the loss of the large hollow trees it nests in. Managed colonies are a genuine conservation measure for this species.