What are stingless bees?
Bee scienceReviewed 2026-08-09
Short answerTrue
Around five hundred species of tropical social bees that cannot sting, store honey in sealed resin pots rather than in wax comb, and produce a few hundred grams a year rather than tens of kilograms. They are kept for honey across the Neotropics, Australia and Southeast Asia, and their honey is a genuinely different product.
How they differ from honey bees
- No functional sting. Some bite, some crawl into hair and eyes, and none can sting.
- Honey in pots of cerumen — a wax and plant resin mixture — not in combs of wax.
- Yields of hundreds of grams a year, against tens of kilograms from an Apis colony.
- Wetter, more acidic honey that ferments readily, which several traditions treat as the point rather than as spoilage.
- Slow colony founding: a new nest is provisioned gradually from the parent, so colonies cannot simply be split.
Where they are kept
Meliponiculture developed independently in Mesoamerica, South America, Australia and Southeast Asia, and stingless bees are harvested from wild nests across sub-Saharan Africa. Maya keeping of Melipona beecheii in hollow-log hives is the best documented, with a pre-Columbian record and a colonial tribute record behind it.
Sources
- Ecology and Natural History of Tropical Bees — Cambridge University Press (1989) · Monograph
- Global meliponiculture: challenges and opportunities — Apidologie (2006) · Peer-reviewed article
- The Bees of the World — Johns Hopkins University Press (2007) · Textbook
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