What comes out of this land · Melipona honey
01. Honey
Melipona honey
From the xunan kab, the stingless bee the Maya have cared for over centuries.
Sizes
120 ml — Price · B4 · 250 ml — Price · B4
WhatsApp not configured · B9
Local delivery in Tulum · pickup at the nursery · ask about shipping on WhatsApp
The jar carries its own QR. It opens farmhousetulum.com/p/miel-melipona and lands on this page: where it comes from, what the literature says and who tends it.
How to use it
- Raw, by the spoonful
- In warm infusions, never boiling
- Jar tightly closed, out of the fridge
- It is normal for it to be liquid: it is not watered down
Xunan kab — the lady
Melipona beecheii · Meliponini · sin aguijón
The xunan kab does not sting. It lives in hollow logs—the jobones—passed from one generation to the next, and produces a fraction of what the European bee produces. That is why its honey was never an ordinary commodity: it was offering, medicine and currency.
Traditional Maya physicians, the ah dzac, used it for «cold» and «hot» ailments, respiratory and digestive illnesses, fevers, wounds, burns and bites. Those uses are not brochure folklore: they are recorded in Maya manuscripts such as El Ritual de los Bacabes, the Calepino Maya de Motul and the Manuscrito de Chan Cah, and were systematised by Ocampo Rosales in Pot-Honey (Springer, 2013).
Our honey comes from the meliponary inside the solar, a few metres from the garden. Every harvest tastes different because it depends on what is flowering around it: chaká, ts'its'ilche', tajonal. And it is scarce by definition: a melipona hive yields around two kilos of honey a year, where a European honeybee hive yields twenty to thirty in this same region.
Why it is different
It has more moisture and more acidity than Apis honey. That is why it is liquid, slightly sour and does not crystallise the same way: it does not meet the parameters written for European honeybee honey because it simply is not the same product.
What the literature says
Stingless bee honeys contain between 13 and 44 g of trehalulose per 100 g: a rare sugar with low glycaemic and insulinaemic indices, antioxidant activity, and non-cariogenic.
Why its survival matters
Between 1981 and 2004 the peninsula lost 93 % of its Melipona beecheii hives: deforestation, the arrival of the Africanised bee and, above all, the break in passing the craft between generations. Every jobón still working is a decision that this will not end.
Sources
Fletcher, M. T., Hungerford, N. L., Webber, D. et al. (2020). Stingless bee honey, a novel source of trehalulose: a biologically active disaccharide with health benefits. Scientific Reports, 10, 12128.
Moo-Huchin, V. M. et al. (2015). Physicochemical Properties of Melipona beecheii Honey of the Yucatan Peninsula. Journal of Food Research, 4(5).
Ocampo Rosales, G. R. (2013). Medicinal Uses of Melipona beecheii Honey, by the Ancient Maya. En Vit, Pedro & Roubik (eds.), Pot-Honey, pp. 229–240. Springer.
Ramón-Sierra, J. et al. (2020). Effects of phenolic and protein extracts from Melipona beecheii honey on pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus. Food Science and Biotechnology, 29(7), 1013–1021.
Villanueva-G, R., Roubik, D. W. & Colli-Ucán, W. (2005). Extinction of Melipona beecheii and traditional beekeeping in the Yucatán peninsula. Bee World, 86(2), 35–41.
Verified in September 2026. This information is cultural and educational; it is not medical advice and does not attribute curative properties to the product.
