The honeybee that sweetens your tea isn’t the only kind of bee that makes honey. Stingless bees have been around twice as long as honeybees, and there are more than 600 species of them in the tropics, mostly in the Americas. In order to show a stingless bee nest close up, I planned our filming trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, for March, when beekeeper Emilio Pérez harvests his stingless bees’ honey. Once a year, when it’s dry and plants are flowering, he and his daughter open up their 80 boxes of stingless bees and collect most of the honey their colonies produced the previous year. So, what does stingless bee honey taste like? Find out in this week’s newsletter and in our episode, where you’ll see Deep Look cinematographer Josh Cassidy and me take part in an impromptu honey tasting.
Stingless Bees Guard Tasty Honey With Barricades, Bouncers and Bites
Image: Josh Cassidy/KQED
Stingless bees are astute architects. They collect plant resin and mix it with wax to create a flexible building material called cerumen, which they use to build all sorts of structures. They build runways, pots to store their honey and cells for their offspring.
Photo: Josh Cassidy/KQED
Stingless bees don’t have stingers to defend their precious product. So, how do they keep thieves out? They can bite, call more of their sisters by releasing pheromones, and tangle in an animal’s hair. And if an intruder like a bee from another colony tries to enter their hive, guard bees sniff it out and kill it.
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🐜The plant resin that stingless bees mix with wax to build their structures keeps ants away. Ants hate the resin’s smell and stickiness.
💂♂️Some species have just one guard at their nest entrance. Other species have a mini army of 15 guard bees.
🍯Stingless bees, also known as meliponines, produce smaller amounts of honey than honeybees.
👄In Latin America and Asia, stingless bee honey is sold as a health product to treat ailments like sore throats.
⚕️Since stingless bees collect resins, pollen and nectar from a host of plants – many in the rainforest – scientists are studying their honey for chemicals that might have medicinal properties.
😷Honeys from both stingless bees and honeybees contain hydrogen peroxide, which is antimicrobial.
🐝👑Both honeybees and stingless bees live in colonies with worker bees and queens.
PLAY
Name That Critter
What bee is big, gold and fuzzy, has green eyes, smells like perfume, drinks nectar, can’t sting, and has the nickname “teddy bear” bee? Find the answer at the bottom of this newsletter.
Image: Josh Cassidy/KQED
EVENT
Spooky Science on Screen — Deep Look at KQED Fest
Hoo! Hoo! Don’t miss Deep Look’s host Laura Klivans and lead producer and cinematographer Josh Cassidy in conversation for a special spooky screening at KQED headquarters in San Francisco, Saturday, Oct. 19, at 1:30 p.m., as part of this year’s KQED Fest. We’ll play some of Deep Look’s favorite Halloween-themed videos about bats, crows, owls and spiders, and hear from experts. Plus, we’ll have special critter tables, including one with live bats! There will also be a Deep Look photobooth. Even more is happening at KQED Fest. Check out the full schedule of FREE events from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., at KQED in San Francisco. Join us!
Thanks to support from our Patreon patrons, we filmed not one but TWO Deep Look episodes in Oaxaca, Mexico — our cochineal insects episode and our stingless bees episode. In the photo above, beekeeper Emilio Pérez holds up a box of Melipona beecheii bees so that Josh Cassidy, our cinematographer, can film their honey pots and the brood cells that hold their offspring. Josh is wearing a protective net around his face to prevent getting bitten.
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We hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter. Thank you for your support! Until next week!
- The Deep Look Team and Science Teams
Deep Look is KQED’s award-winning wildlife video series that reveals the tiny dramas playing out in the natural world. We’re a member-supported YouTube series from KQED and PBS Digital Studios. Learn more.
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A male Valley carpenter bee! With their short tongues, Valley carpenter bees can’t easily drink the nectar from tubular flowers. So they use powerful mandibles to slice into the blooms and steal it. It’s called nectar robbing, since the plants don’t get the benefit of being pollinated by the enormous bees. The male Valley carpenter bee is known as the “teddy bear” bee. It is almost as big as your thumb, and may look impressive but does not sting. The photo in the Name That Critter section is of a male Valley carpenter bee, Xylocopa sonorina.
