Stingless bees vs honey bees

The sting is the least of it

The name is the most misleading thing about them. Stingless bees do have a sting — it is simply reduced and non-functional, and defence takes other forms: biting, tangling in hair, and in some species a caustic secretion. A disturbed Trigona colony is a genuinely unpleasant experience, just not a painful one in the way a honey bee is.

What actually separates the two groups runs much deeper. Meliponini and Apini diverged in the Cretaceous, and their social systems arrived at similar destinations by different routes — which is why the resemblances are shallower than they look.

Different ways of being a colony

The mass-provisioning difference is worth dwelling on. A honey bee larva is fed continuously by nurse bees and its caste is decided by what it is fed; a stingless bee cell is filled with food, an egg laid on it, and the cell sealed. In several Melipona species caste is genetically influenced rather than nutritionally determined, which produces a problem honey bees do not have — colonies can produce far more queens than they need.

Different ways of reproducing a colony

A honey bee swarm is dramatic and abrupt: half the colony leaves with the old queen and finds a home afterwards. Stingless bees do the opposite. Scouts locate and prepare a new cavity over days or weeks, workers ferry cerumen and food to it, and only then does a virgin queen move in. The parent colony is not halved and the daughter colony is not homeless — which is why meliponiculture can propagate colonies by splitting boxes with a reliability honey bee beekeeping cannot match.

Why it matters for pollination

Stingless bees forage over much shorter distances — often a few hundred metres against several kilometres for a honey bee — which makes them poorer at covering a large monoculture and better at servicing a diverse patch. Several species buzz-pollinate, which honey bees cannot do at all, and that matters for tomatoes, aubergines and a long list of other crops.