Melipona bees
A genus rather than a single species — Around 70 species, all Neotropical, from Mexico to northern Argentina. The genus that most Latin American meliponiculture is built on. General statements below are statements about the group.
The 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.
Can it sting?
No functional sting. Melipona are among the most docile bees anywhere and can be kept beside a doorway, which is exactly why Maya and Amazonian beekeeping traditions placed hives inside the household compound.
How to recognise it
Stout, hairy and honey-bee-sized or larger, typically 7 to 15 mm, usually dark with pale abdominal banding. Noticeably heavier-bodied than the small Trigona and Tetragonula species that share their range.
- Large for a stingless bee — comparable to a honey bee, which most meliponines are not.
- Nest entrance is usually a modest hole rimmed with mud or resin rather than an elaborate projecting tube.
- Slow, heavy flight compared with the darting movement of the smaller genera.
Body length 7–15 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
- 300–4,000 individuals
- Colony lifespan
- Perennial and long-lived. Managed colonies are routinely divided rather than replaced, and some nest sites are recorded as continuously occupied for decades.
- Winter
- No winter. Colonies store against the dry season, and the stores are far smaller than a temperate honey bee colony would need.
- Castes
- Queen, Worker, Male
- Nesting
- Existing cavities and tubes; Resin-lined cavities
Nests in hollow trees, with brood in horizontal combs and food in separate clustered pots of cerumen. That separation is what makes a Melipona hive harvestable: honey can be drawn from the pots without cutting into brood, which is the whole basis of managed meliponiculture.
- Carries pollen
- Corbicula (pollen basket) on the hind leg
- On the wing
- January to December
Year-round, with foraging shaped by wet and dry seasons rather than by temperature.
Lifecycle
- Mass provisioningA cell is filled with food, an egg laid on it, and the cell sealed. The larva is never fed again, which is the opposite of the progressive feeding a honey bee larva receives.Roughly 40 to 50 days from egg to adult in most species.
- Queen productionIn Melipona, caste is partly genetically determined rather than decided by diet alone, so colonies produce far more queens than they need and most are killed or expelled. No other eusocial bee does this.
Where it lives and what it does
- Habitat
- Tropical forest, forest margin, plantation and garden throughout Central and South America, dependent on large hollow trees for wild nest sites.
- Distribution
- Neotropical only — Mexico through Central America to Brazil, Bolivia and northern Argentina. Absent from Africa, Asia and Australia, which have their own meliponine genera.
- Behaviour
- Forages over a short radius — often only a few hundred metres against several kilometres for a honey bee — which makes Melipona honey a genuinely local product and makes the bees poor at servicing large monocultures.
- Pollination role
- Several Melipona species buzz-pollinate, vibrating the flower to shake pollen from poricidal anthers. Honey bees cannot do this at all, which makes Melipona significant for tomato, aubergine and a long list of Solanaceae and Melastomataceae crops.
- What it forages on
- Generalist within a short flight radius, which means the honey reflects whatever is flowering within a few hundred metres of the nest rather than a landscape-scale flora.
Honey
Stores a harvestable surplus
Stores enough to be harvested — typically three to six litres a year from a strong colony, against forty or fifty kilograms from a honey bee hive. The honey runs 25 to 30 per cent water and ferments rather than crystallising.
Relationship with people
- How people interact with it
- The basis of the oldest managed beekeeping in the Americas. Maya meliponiculture with Melipona beecheii is documented in the Madrid Codex and predates European contact by centuries.
- Management
- Kept in hollow logs traditionally and now in modular boxes with separate brood and honey compartments. Colonies are propagated by division, which works far more reliably than honey bee swarm control because these bees reproduce by budding rather than by swarming.
- Conservation
- Dependent on large hollow trees for wild nest sites, and declining with forest clearance across most of the range. Managed colonies are increasingly a conservation measure rather than only a production one.
Sources
- HoneyHQ editorial synthesis — HEKNO Ltd · HoneyHQ synthesis
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
- The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting — Routledge (1999) · Historical text
How sources are selected and weighted is set out in the sources and evidence policy.
Guides covering this bee
- What is stingless bee honey?Honey from a completely different group of bees — wetter, sharper, stored in pots rather than comb, and produced in litres rather than tens of kilograms. It is not a variety of honey. It is a different product.
- Stingless bees vs honey beesBoth are eusocial, both store honey, both have queens and workers — and they have been evolving apart for something like eighty million years. Almost everything else differs.
- Meliponiculture: keeping stingless beesThe oldest managed beekeeping in the Americas, and a practice that is expanding fast in Southeast Asia. It looks almost nothing like keeping honey bees.
- Buzz pollination explainedAround 6 to 8 per cent of flowering plants lock their pollen inside tubes that open through a single pore, and release it only to a bee that grips the flower and vibrates. Honey bees cannot do it, which is why tomatoes are pollinated by bumblebees.
Tools for supporting this bee
- Plant recommendation tool
Which plant fills this specific gap?
- Bee-friendly garden planner
What should I plant in the space I actually have?
- Flowering calendar
What should I plant so that something is always in flower for bees?