Cerumen

Definition

Stingless bees secrete wax as honey bees do, but mix it with resin collected from plants to produce cerumen — tougher, darker and stickier than wax alone. They build brood comb and the characteristic egg-shaped storage pots from it, and use resin at the nest entrance as a defence against ants and small hive beetles. It is also why stingless bee honey carries a faint resinous note that honey bee honey does not.

Where the word gets used loosely

Cerumen is not beeswax and does not behave like it — it is not used in candles or cosmetics in the same way, and it is one of several reasons stingless bee products sit outside regulations written for Apis.

Honey records that discuss this

• Kelulut honeyDistinctly 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.

Bee records that discuss this

• Stingless beesThe 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.
• Australian stingless beeAustralia'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.
• Melipona beesThe 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.
• KelulutThe 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.
• Robber stingless beesThe 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.

Guide records that discuss this

• Beeswax: what it is and how bees make itA wax secreted from a bee's own abdomen at enormous metabolic cost, and for most of European history the more valuable half of the hive.