Most honey comes from Apis mellifera, the honeybee everyone pictures when they hear the word bee. Trigona biroi is a different genus entirely, a stingless bee native to the Philippines, locally called lukot. It cannot sting you, which sounds like a gimmick until you learn why it matters for the honey itself.

Honeybees store honey in wax combs sealed with a thin layer of propolis at the edges. Trigona bees do it differently. They build their storage pots from cerumen, a mix of wax and propolis, so the propolis sits inside honey for its entire life in the hive. 

That’s the real reason it tastes different from the honey in your cupboard. It also explains the sourness. Trigona honey is naturally more acidic than regular honey, with a pH of 3.2 to 4.5, so the tang is a sign of the honey, not of spoilage. Its sugars are different too: 13 to 44% of them are trehalulose, a rare sugar with roughly a third of the glycaemic impact of table sugar. People expecting Manuka sweetness are often surprised by this on the first taste.

A single trigona bee hive holds around 100,000 workers, more than a typical honeybee colony, and yields only a fraction of what those bees produce in a year. That scarcity is not commercially attractive for most companies. For us, its medicinal properties and beautifully dynamic flavour profile is why we believe its important we bring these stingless bee products to as many as possible.