Southeast Asia
The home of managed wild nesting: rafter boards and tikung planks that invite giant honey bees to build where they can be harvested, which is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
11 practices · region
- Tualang tree honey harvestingHoney hunting · Practised, decliningClimbing emergent rainforest trees at night to take giant honey bee combs, in peninsular Malaysia and adjacent forests. The climb is the whole difficulty: colonies cluster in the crown of a tree that may be seventy metres tall.
- Tikung boardsBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceShaped planks hung in seasonally flooded forest in West Kalimantan for giant honey bees to build on. The bees are entirely wild, the boards are owned and inherited, and the arrangement is neither hunting nor hive beekeeping.
- Rafter beekeeping in the Mekong deltaBeekeeping tradition · Local living practiceAngled poles set in melaleuca forest in southern Vietnam, inviting giant honey bees to build where they can be worked. The same solution as tikung, arrived at in a different forest with a different tree.
- Dwarf honey bee harvestingHoney hunting · Widespread living practiceThe small, common, unremarked harvest. Apis florea builds a single palm-sized comb around an open branch, holds a modest amount of honey, and is taken casually across South and Southeast Asia by people who would not describe themselves as honey hunters.
- Giant honey bee harvesting in mainland Southeast AsiaHoney hunting · Practised, decliningHarvesting Apis dorsata across Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia, where the same migratory bee is taken from forest trees, from cliff faces and from wooden rafters set out to attract it. One bee, several quite different relationships with it.
- MeliponicultureStingless-bee keeping · RevivedKeeping stingless bees for honey, wax-resin and pollination, in log sections, clay pots or purpose-built boxes. Practised independently across the Neotropics, Australia, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa, and constrained everywhere by the same biological limit.
- Kelulut keepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceStingless beekeeping across Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand that has expanded rapidly from a traditional base into a commercial sector, bringing with it price premiums, health claims and an authenticity problem arriving at the same speed.
- Fermented pot honeyCultural use · Local living practiceStingless bee honey ferments readily because it is wetter than Apis honey, and several traditions treat that as the point rather than as spoilage — deliberately aged, soured and drunk.
- Philippine stingless beekeepingStingless-bee keeping · Widespread living practiceKeeping Tetragonula biroi in boxes across the Philippines, driven by university research programmes and by demand for pollination in mango and coconut. A young sector built partly on older Indigenous knowledge of the same bee.
- Honey in Buddhist traditionCultural use · Widespread living practiceHoney among the substances monastics may store as medicine, an offering narrative attached to a festival, and a modern argument about whether honey is ethically consumable that reaches different conclusions.
- Wax-resist dyeingCultural use · Widespread living practiceWax drawn or stamped onto cloth so that dye cannot reach it, then removed to leave a pattern. A living industrial demand for beeswax that almost no consumer connects to bees.