Springer Pot-Honey: A legacy of stingless bees

The stingless bees are one of the most diverse, attractive, fascinating, conspicuous and useful of all the insect groups of the tropical world. This is a formidable and contentious claim but I believe it can be backed up. They are fifty times more species rich than the honey bees, the other tribe of highly eusocial bees. They are ubiquitous in the tropics and thrive in tropical cities. In rural areas, they nest in a diversity of sites and are found on the flowers of a broad diversity of crop plants. Their role in natural systems is barely studied but they almost certainly deserve that hallowed title of keystone species. They are popular with the general public and are greatly appreciated in zoos and gardens. The chapters of this book provide abundant further evidence of the ecological and economic importance of stingless bees. Review From the reviews: “This up-to-date treatise … contains an impressive amount of information about the stingless bees of the world. … contributors provide detailed information about the diversity, cultural and historical influence, biology, and ecology of these bees throughout the work. … it is a must-have for bee and honey researchers, students, and enthusiasts. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above; general readers.” (J. M. Gonzalez, Choice, Vol. 51 (1), September, 2013) “This new publication is one of the first books specifically devoted to stingless bees. It is certainly the first to focus on the honey produced by this group of insects. … The chapters of this book provide abundant evidence of ecological and economic importance of the stingless bees. … this book provides enough knowledge to stimulate the realization of the nutritional and medicinal potential of pot honey.” (Tim A. Heard, Archivos Latinoamericanos de Nutrición, Vol. 62 (4), 2012) From the Back Cover The meliponines, stingless honey-making bees, encircle the tropical world and penetrate every forest there. This book brings together and synthesizes, on a global scale and for the first time, information on these bees as honey producers and natural alchemists. Their ability to store their food in flexible cerumen ‘pots’ made from wax and resin enables them to produce honey for which the world has no other source. These little known and often rare denizens of remote reaches of the globe have found a way to produce honey and survive in the permanently wet and unforgiving rain forests, since before the continents of Africa and South America split apart 100 million years ago. In Australia, we find them equipped to survive in cold deserts, and in the Amazon some feed within the nests of other social bees, utilize flesh of dead animals, or even live among scale bugs that give them food and building material. Some are obligate parasites, stealing the brood food from inside nests of other meliponines. Pot-honey is a minor honey in the market but a major honey in the forest, produced by many hundreds of flowering plants and demanding integrated conservation. Complementing the unifloral honeys of Apis mellifera, many more pot-honeys are yet to be appreciated by the public. The analytical corpus developed to study and standardize honey produced in combs is also valid for pot-honey. Honey ferments inside the nests of Meliponini, and the process continues after harvest. According to A. mellifera standards it is spoiled, yet a more medicinal product results and may remodel our concept of honey. As shown here, the meliponines, support a legacy of bees interacting with human culture, traditions, art, science and philosophy.