Honey is the world's original natural sweetener, used by people for thousands of years both as food and as traditional medicine. But not all honey comes from the same bee. The two groups most people encounter are European honey bees and stingless bees, and the honey they produce is genuinely different.
European Honey Bees
The European or Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, is found naturally across Europe, the Middle East and parts of Africa, and is divided into around 20 subspecies. Manuka honey comes from European honey bees, named for the plant the bees prefer rather than the bee itself.
Most European honey bees sting. They're comparatively large, swarm readily, and are susceptible to a number of diseases known to wipe out entire hives.
Stingless Bees (Trigona and Melipona)
Stingless bees are classified as either Trigona (Tetragonula) or Melipona, and live in tropical and subtropical regions including Australia, Africa, Southeast Asia, and parts of Mexico and Brazil. As with European bees there are many subspecies, and each produces distinct honey. Malaysian stingless bee honey is known locally as Kelulut; Philippine stingless bee honey is known as Kiyot.
Unlike Manuka, the term Trigona refers to the bee species rather than a plant.
A note on the name: the genus Trigona was substantially reclassified in 2013, with many species moved to Tetragonula following DNA studies published in 2007 that revealed significant differences between species previously grouped together. Anaya's bees are properly Tetragonula biroi. We've kept the word Trigona as an ode to when we started in 2013, and because it's become synonymous with the brand.
Trigona bees are smaller than their European counterparts and black rather than yellow-and-black. They can become defensive if threatened, but are generally calmer, and they tend to be more disease-resistant, in part because of the high levels of propolis in their hives.
Like Manuka, Trigona honey varies in taste from region to region, and sometimes between hives only a few miles apart, depending on which plants the bees visit.
What Honey Generally Offers
Raw honey retains more of its beneficial compounds than processed honey. Both contain:
- Amino acids, vitamins and minerals
- Antioxidants, which help neutralise free radicals and protect cells from oxidative damage
- Antibacterial and antifungal activity, which is why honey has a long history in traditional wound care
- Compounds that soothe sore throats, which is among the better-evidenced uses of honey
Honey is a food rather than a medicine, and the strength of evidence varies considerably across these. Sore throat relief is well supported; broader therapeutic claims are far less settled.
What Makes Anaya's Trigona Honey Different
Because stingless bees build their storage pots from cerumen, a mixture of wax and propolis, our honey is naturally infused with propolis compounds as it matures. That's a structural difference from Apis mellifera honey, which is stored in pure wax.
Our Trigona honey is independently laboratory tested, and those tests found it killed 83% of the bacteria tested. You can see the full test results and the underlying research, including the 2007 Kanazawa University study on the antibacterial activity of stingless bee honey.
Our Bees Are Not Raised as Honey Producers
An Apis mellifera hive produces around 30 kilograms of honey a year. A stingless bee hive produces around 500 grams. That's the entire annual output of a colony.
Which is why, for us, these bees are kept as pollinators rather than honey producers. Stingless bees are sometimes called native bees, particularly in Australia, and the name is apt: they're exceptionally good at pollinating local plant species. In the Philippines that means coconut, mango, tamarind, calamansi and pineapple.
The farmers our beekeepers work with report crop yield increases of up to 40% through pollination alone. The honey is close to a by-product of that.
Why Does Stingless Bee Honey Taste Sour?
The sourness is one of its defining characteristics, and it varies by species and by what's flowering nearby. We've written about the science behind the sour taste separately.
In parts of Malaysia, the Heterotrigona itama variety produces a sweeter honey, largely because those bees draw heavily on Solanaceae flowers. Anaya's Tetragonula biroi prefer coconut, mango and tamarind nectar, which produces something quite different.
Even our own honey varies batch to batch, because our beekeepers work with different farms. Depending on what's in bloom, you might taste mango, pineapple, tamarind, calamansi, coconut, banana or occasionally lychee. The through-line is a citrussy sweet-sour profile that people either love immediately or take a moment to adjust to.
Why Any of This Matters
Crops need pollinators, and pollinator populations are under pressure worldwide. Stingless bees offer farmers an organic route to pollination without chemical inputs, and a couple of hives is enough to service a large farm, though Trigona bees rarely fly more than a few miles from home.
So if you try our honey, you're getting something unusual to taste, and supporting a farming model that works with the local ecosystem rather than against it.
Explore the Immunity Care range, including Raw Trigona Honey (Active 25+).
Never give honey of any kind to infants under 12 months, due to the risk of infant botulism. Raw honey naturally contains pollen; anyone with a bee product or pollen allergy should be cautious.