We were intrigued by this new venture of a friend and decided to visit his home to view it – his setup of rearing stingless bees and harvesting their honey. After hearing about it from our previous meets, we took a drive to his home yesterday afternoon to see the real deal for ourselves.
There were two tree trunks, shaved on the sides to reduce their overall size without affecting the hives inside. And each has a honey collection box attached and along with what I assume would be several hundred bees. Pretty simple and that’s it; you don’t have to take care of the bees. They know what to do and where to go.
What is done then is just to collect the honey whenever the pods are filled and this process is repeated. Just be sure not to totally drain the pods empty as this will make the bees think the pods are spoilt and they won’t fill them up again upon this realization. With trial and error, our friend discovered this interesting trait and six pods remain unused. Amazing.
Consuming the raw honey made by stingless bees has a ton of health benefits. One should google up on this.
We drank the harvested honey as is, without adding water. It was watery, not thick like the typical commercial honey. It was also not sweet but rather tangy and almost apple cider vinegar-like. I never knew and thought all this while, honey is generally sweet. But no.
Now the stingless bees or meliponines are quite a species. They do not sting, hence the name stingless and although they do have stingers, the stingers are so tiny they are useless for defense. The bees can bite though, if threatened. Later after the visit, I googled up on them and learnt some new and interesting stuff that I never knew about honey and bees in general.
Question now is should we also invest in a trunk that comes with the little hard-working meliponines churning out honey?
Honey home one
Honey home two
Lifted cover reveals the inside
The harvested honey for drinking!
Remarks