Stingless bees

Not every stingless bee makes honey worth taking

Around five hundred species share the tribe, and their honey production runs the whole ladder. Some store a genuine surplus, most store very little, and at least one genus gathers nothing at all — Lestrimelitta has lost its pollen baskets and lives by raiding other colonies. A section that listed every meliponine under a heading about honey would be selling a species list as a product range.

The bees

• 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.groupEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.groupEusocial
• 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.genusEusocial
• 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.genusEusocial
• 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.genusEusocial
• 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.genusEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.speciesEusocial
• 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.genusEusocial

The honeys

Resolved through the bee records — a honey appears here because it names a bee that belongs to Meliponini, not because of anything in its description.

• Jataí honeyBrazil principally, and across Central and South America from Mexico to Argentina.Sharply acidic and fruity with a fermented tang — closer to a sharp fruit syrup than to what most people expect honey to taste like.
• Sugarbag honeyQueensland, northern New South Wales, the Northern Territory and northern Western Australia.Sharply tangy and fruity with a resinous edge — often described as lemon-and-caramel, and quite unlike honey bee honey in every respect.
• Melipona honeyThe Yucatán peninsula of Mexico, and Central America more widely. Related meliponine honeys are produced across tropical Latin America, Australia and southeast Asia.Tart, complex and only moderately sweet — a distinct acidic tang over a floral base, closer to a fermented fruit drink than to honey bee honey.
• Kelulut honeyMalaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Brunei, from managed and wild colonies of several Heterotrigona and Tetragonula species.Distinctly sour and tangy with a fruity, almost fermented character — closer to a sharp fruit syrup than to what most people expect honey to taste like.
• Jandaíra honeyRio Grande do Norte, Ceará and the wider Brazilian northeast.Fluid, sharply acidic and aromatic — closer to a fruit vinegar than to honey as most people know it. That acidity is normal rather than spoilage.
• Uruçu honeyBahia, Pernambuco, Alagoas and Sergipe in northeastern Brazil.Fluid, sharply acidic and floral — closer to a fruit syrup than to honey as most people know it, and the acidity is normal rather than spoilage.
• Mandaçaia honeyMinas Gerais, São Paulo, Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul.Softer and rounder than the northeastern stingless honeys — still acidic, but with more caramel behind it and less citrus sharpness.
• Scaptotrigona honeyThe Sierra Norte de Puebla, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, and south through Central America.Sharp, resinous and distinctly woody, with a fermented-fruit edge. Among the more challenging stingless honeys and one of the most prized within its region.
• African stingless bee honeyThe equatorial belt from Cameroon and the Congo basin east to Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, and south into Zambia.Sharp, fruity and faintly smoky, with the acidity common to all stingless bee honey. Descriptions vary widely because the species and the flora both do.

Three independent traditions

Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia and Australia each developed stingless beekeeping without reference to the others, and Africa harvests its own genera with almost no research behind it. None of these traditions descends from European beekeeping.

• South America (4)
• Brazil (4)
• Yucatán (2)
• Mexico (2)
• Asia (1)
• Africa (1)
• Ethiopia (1)
• Australia (1)
• Southeast Asia (1)
• Thailand (1)

Guides

• How honey is madeNectar is mostly water. Honey is mostly sugar. Everything interesting about honey happens in the gap between those two sentences.
• The other hive products: beeswax, propolis, royal jelly and bee pollenFour substances a colony makes or collects besides honey, each with a real biological function and a marketing story that runs well ahead of it. Here is what each one actually is.
• What makes honey expensivePrice tracks scarcity, harvest difficulty and certification cost far more than it tracks quality. Understanding which of those you are paying for is most of the skill in buying honey.
• Why some honeys are rareRarity in honey almost always comes down to botany and weather rather than to deliberate restriction. Understanding the mechanism explains why supply swings so violently from year to year.
• Honey chemistry explainedHoney is a supersaturated sugar solution with a small and consequential fraction of everything else. Almost every practical question about honey resolves into a question about that composition.
• Honey moisture explainedWater content is the single most consequential number on a honey analysis. It decides whether the honey keeps, how it pours, how fast it sets and whether it is legal to sell.
• Honey adulteration explainedHoney is among the most adulterated foods in world trade. The methods have become more sophisticated as the tests have improved, and the arms race is the reason testing is now a specialist discipline.
• A history of beekeepingFrom cliff-face honey hunting to the movable frame, the history of beekeeping is a history of one problem: how to take the honey without destroying the colony.

Side by side

• Honey bee vs stingless bee — Two social bees that both store honey, kept by people on different continents for thousands of years. One produces sixty kilograms a year and one produces one, and the difference explains a great deal about which tradition survived.
• Melipona vs Tetragonula — The two genera that carry stingless beekeeping on opposite sides of the world. One is honey-bee-sized with small colonies, the other tiny with large ones — and that inversion decides almost everything about keeping them.
• Stingless bees vs bumblebees — The two social bees that are not honey bees. Both live in colonies, both buzz-pollinate, and one of them dies out completely every autumn — which is the difference everything else follows from.
• Sugarbag vs kelulut honey — The two commercial stingless bee honeys of the Indo-Pacific, from neighbouring genera on either side of the Wallace line — one backed by forty thousand years of harvesting and one by an industry younger than the smartphone.