What is stingless bee honey?

A different bee, not a different flower

Every other honey in this catalogue is defined by what the bees foraged on. Stingless bee honey is defined by the bee. Meliponini is a tribe of more than five hundred species across the tropics of the Americas, Africa, Asia and Australia — genuinely stingless, in the sense that the sting is vestigial and cannot be used, though several genera bite hard enough to make the point.

They are not small honey bees. Colonies run from a few hundred workers to tens of thousands depending on genus, against forty or fifty thousand in a summer Apis colony. They store honey in clustered pots of cerumen — a mixture of wax and plant resin — rather than in hexagonal comb, and they keep brood and food in physically separate structures.

Why it is wetter, and why that matters

The single most consequential difference is water. Apis honey is ripened to 17 or 18 per cent moisture and sealed; meliponine honey is routinely 25 to 30 per cent and frequently left unsealed in the pot. That is not underripe honey — it is what the bees make, and the resin in the pot walls contributes antimicrobial protection that Apis honey achieves through concentration alone.

Why the standards do not fit

The Codex Alimentarius honey standard, and the national standards derived from it, were written for Apis mellifera. They cap moisture at 20 per cent, which classifies essentially all genuine stingless bee honey as out of specification. That is a defect in the standard rather than in the product, and Brazil, Australia and several other producing countries have written or are writing separate specifications rather than treating an indigenous food as defective.

Where it comes from

• The Neotropics — Brazil, Mexico and Central America — where Melipona and Scaptotrigona are kept in the oldest continuous beekeeping tradition in the Americas.
• Southeast Asia, where Heterotrigona and Tetragonula kelulut beekeeping has grown into the most commercially developed meliponiculture anywhere.
• Australia, where Tetragonula carbonaria produces sugarbag honey and has a long Aboriginal harvesting tradition behind it.
• Equatorial Africa, where Meliponula and Dactylurina are harvested and almost never studied.