Mayan stingless bee

How to recognise it

A small, stout, dark brown bee around 9-11 mm, without the pointed abdomen of a honey bee and with reduced wing venation. It has no functional sting. The nest entrance is a distinctive tube of resin and mud projecting from the log.

• Small, dark and stout, with visibly reduced wing venation compared with a honey bee.
• No functional sting — the defence is biting and swarming around the face.
• Nests in hollow logs sealed at both ends with mud, with a projecting resin entrance tube.
• Stores honey in clusters of egg-shaped resin pots rather than in wax comb.

Body length 8–12 mm (typically 10 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

500–4,000 individuals

Colony lifespan

Many years — a well-kept jobon colony can persist for decades and is inherited within families.

Winter

No winter. Colonies contract during the wet season and expand as the forest flowers in the dry months.

Castes

Queen, Workers, Males

Nesting

Resin-lined cavities; Existing cavities and tubes

Nests in tree hollows in the wild and in hollow log sections — jobones — in cultivation, sealed at each end with a clay disc and stacked horizontally under a thatched shelter. Brood is reared in horizontal spiral combs and honey stored separately in clusters of resin pots, an architecture completely unlike a honey bee's.

Carries pollen

Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg

On the wing

January to December

Active year-round, with the main forage and harvest in the Yucatán dry season.

Lifecycle

1. 1Colony foundingReproduction is by a slow process quite unlike honey bee swarming: workers provision a new nest site over weeks before a virgin queen walks or flies to it. Colonies cannot simply be split at will, which is a real constraint on the beekeeping.
2. 2Brood rearingCells are mass-provisioned and sealed before the egg is laid, then abandoned — the opposite of honey bee progressive feeding.
3. 3HarvestHoney pots are opened individually and drained, which allows harvest without destroying the nest.

Where it lives and what it does

Habitat

Tropical dry and semi-deciduous forest of the Yucatán peninsula, plus village gardens and managed meliponaries.

Distribution

The Yucatán peninsula and southern Mexico south through Central America to Costa Rica, with related species across tropical Latin America.

Behaviour

Slow, deliberate foraging over a relatively short range — a few hundred metres rather than the kilometres a honey bee covers. That short range makes it a highly effective pollinator of the immediate forest and a poor competitor with honey bees over a wide landscape.

Pollination role

An important pollinator of Yucatán forest plants and of several crops, and effective on flowers that require buzz pollination or that honey bees handle badly. Several native plants are visited by little else.

High within its short foraging range, and specifically valuable for native forest plants.

What it forages on

A generalist on Yucatán forest and scrub flora — tajonal, dzidzilché and hundreds of others.

Honey

Stores small quantities, occasionally harvested

Produces one to two litres a year against a honey bee colony's twenty to sixty kilograms, and the honey is a different substance: thin, tart, over 22% moisture, prone to fermentation, and used medicinally as much as as food. Its high water content means it does not meet the legal definition of honey in most jurisdictions, which is a live regulatory problem for the producers.

Relationship with people

How people interact with it

Among the oldest documented beekeeping traditions anywhere, and one embedded in religion rather than agriculture. Ah Muzen Cab, the Maya bee deity, appears in the Madrid Codex and in carvings at Tulum; hives were tended on a ritual calendar; and the honey went into balché, a fermented ceremonial drink. Spanish colonisation suppressed the framework, and the arrival of the far more productive western honey bee — and later Africanized bees — made the practice economically marginal.

Management

Kept in jobon log hives or in modern rational boxes that allow non-destructive harvest and colony division. Colonies cannot be split as readily as honey bee ones, which limits how fast a meliponary can grow and makes each colony correspondingly valuable.

Conservation

In serious decline. The number of traditional jobon hives in the Yucatán has collapsed over the last century, and the species faces habitat loss, competition from Africanized honey bees, and the simple fact that the knowledge is held by an ageing generation. Current revival efforts are driven as much by cultural recovery as by the honey.