More water
Stingless bee honeys studied across the tropics carried from about 20 to 42 per cent water. International honey standards set a maximum of 20 per cent, and they were written for honeybee honey alone.
The honey
Not the honey you know
Stingless bee honey is thinner, tarter and rarer than honeybee honey. Chemically it is a different substance, and the research on it is still young.
Pots, not comb
Stingless bees do not build the six-sided comb of the honeybee. They store honey in clusters of rounded pots made of cerumen, a mix of wax and plant resin. Komonil’s beetenders draw the honey from opened pots by syringe, leaving the colony to rebuild.
The yield is small. A stingless bee colony gives a fraction of what a honeybee hive does, which is part of why this honey has always been prized.
What has been measured
A different substance
Unusual sugars
A 2020 study of honey from five stingless bees, including Tetragonisca angustula, the bee in most Komonil hives, found a large share of the sugar was trehalulose, a sugar rare in nature and now the subject of nutritional research.
It changes with the season
Honey from Tetragonisca angustula collected in the dry season has been measured darker and more acidic than honey from the rains. Every harvest tastes of when and where it was made.
Tradition and evidence
The Maya have long used stingless bee honey as medicine as well as food, for the eyes, for wounds and for coughs.
Laboratory and animal studies of stingless bee honey, mostly from Southeast Asia and Brazil, report antioxidant, antibacterial and anti-inflammatory activity, and researchers are testing it in wound dressings. These are research findings, not proven treatments. Honey varies with the bee and the flowers, and Komonil’s own honey has not yet been tested.
Sources: Souza et al., “Composition of stingless bee honey: setting quality standards”, Interciencia 31(12), 2006; Fletcher et al., “Stingless bee honey, a novel source of trehalulose”, Scientific Reports, 2020; study of seasonal variation in Tetragonisca angustula honey, Journal of the Brazilian Chemical Society; Esa et al., “A review on recent progress of stingless bee honey and its hydrogel-based compound for wound care management”, Molecules, 2022; Zulkifli et al., “The potential neuroprotective effects of stingless bee honey”, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 2023.