The Mayan Stingless-Bee Honey Hunters of Tekom, Before the Storms Return

The road from Mérida to Tekom takes about two hours if you don't stop, which you will, because someone will be selling salbutes from a plastic table on the shoulder of Highway 180 and you are not made of stone. I stopped twice on my last drive out in late September, once for salbutes and once because a speed bump near Pisté nearly launched my coffee into the windshield. By the time I reached the apiaries — if you can even call them that — the light had gone flat and gray, the way it does in the Yucatán when hurricane season is deciding what to do next.

I came for the honey. Specifically, I came for the honey of the Melipona beecheii, a stingless bee the ancient Maya called Xunán Kab, and which a small number of families in and around Tekom still tend in hollowed-log hives passed down through generations. This honey is not the honey you know. It is thin, tart, almost cidery, and it is disappearing — squeezed out by Africanized honeybees, by deforestation, by the annual storms that seem to hit harder each year. The families who harvest it are not performers in an agritourism show. They are beekeepers whose livelihoods depend on whether the ceiba trees flower on time.

1. What Melipona honey actually tastes like

Forget the comparison to regular honey. That framing does Melipona honey a disservice, like comparing mezcal to tequila just because they share an agave. The texture is loose, almost watery, and the color ranges from pale amber to something closer to white wine. It tastes sour first, then floral, then faintly medicinal — a finish that sits on the back of your tongue and stays.

The Maya used it for wound care, eye infections, respiratory ailments, and ceremony. Modern meliponiculture researchers at the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán have documented antimicrobial properties that partially back up those traditional claims, though peer-reviewed studies remain limited. A tablespoon stirred into warm water with lime is the single best drink I had in the Yucatán this year, and I include every craft mezcal cocktail in the Mérida bar scene in that assessment.

You will pay between 800 and 1,500 pesos for a small bottle (roughly 250–350 ml), depending on the producer and the season. That reflects a harvest of maybe one to two liters per hive per year.

2. The families still keeping Xunán Kab in Tekom

Tekom is a small town in the eastern Yucatán, roughly 130 kilometers from Mérida. There is no tourist office. There is no signage pointing you toward the meliponaries. What there is: a network of families, mostly Maya-speaking, who maintain anywhere from a handful to several dozen jobón — the traditional hollowed-log hives sealed with mud and stone discs at each end.

Don Ernesto Pat Canul, one of the most experienced keepers in the area, manages his hives behind his house on a residential street with no name that Google Maps will recognize. He showed me how the logs are oriented east to west, the entrance hole always facing the rising sun — not symbolic but practical, he said. Morning warmth activates the colony earlier. His grandson, maybe eleven, stood nearby eating a panucho and looking profoundly unimpressed by my questions.

Not every family welcomes visitors. Don't show up unannounced expecting a tour. The best way in is through a local guide or cultural organization based in Valladolid (see section 4).

3. Why the storms keep getting worse, and why the bees care

Hurricane season in the Yucatán runs June through November, but the real damage tends to cluster in September and October. In 2020, a series of storms devastated Melipona colonies across the peninsula. Entire hives drowned. The bees, which are smaller and more fragile than Apis mellifera, cannot rebuild the way European honeybees can — their colonies grow slowly, and a single catastrophic weather event can wipe out years of careful husbandry.

Deforestation compounds the problem. Melipona beecheii forages on native flowering trees — ramón, tsalam, ja'abin — and when those forests get cleared for cattle or soy, the bees starve. Several keepers I spoke with said their biggest challenge isn't the storms themselves but the fact that the forest doesn't recover between them anymore.

There is a grim irony here. The honey's high price reflects its scarcity, and the scarcity attracts interest from wellness brands and gourmet importers, which in turn creates pressure to scale up production in ways that undermine the traditional low-intervention methods that make the honey worth caring about in the first place.

Stay in Mérida

Top-rated hotels near Mérida

Best locations · Verified reviews · Free cancellation

View deals

Expedia →

4. How to arrange a visit without being a jerk about it

The organization I'd recommend is Ko'ox Tani, a community tourism cooperative based in Valladolid that coordinates visits to meliponaries in several surrounding towns including Tekom and Tahdziú. They work directly with the beekeeping families, the guides speak Maya and Spanish (some English), and the cost is reasonable — around 600–800 pesos per person for a half-day visit that includes transport from Valladolid, time with a keeper, a tasting, and usually a meal.

Skip the "Mayan bee experience" packages sold by the big Chichén Itzá tour operators. Most of them drive you to a staged demonstration near Pisté where someone in a guayabera opens a hive for photos, and the honey you "taste" is conventional honey relabeled. I watched it happen. Depressing.

If you'd rather go independently, drive to Tekom, park near the church on the main plaza, and ask around. But understand that you are asking for someone's time and expertise, and you should compensate accordingly even if no formal fee is posted.

5. Eating with the honey in Mérida

Back in Mérida, Melipona honey shows up in a few serious kitchens, though not as many as the food press would have you believe. Most restaurants that claim to use it are using regular Yucatecan honey, which is fine — Yucatán produces excellent multifloral honey from conventional hives — but it's not the same thing, and charging a 200-peso surcharge for the distinction when the distinction doesn't exist is a racket.

The one place I trust completely is Mestiza Mérida, on Calle 47 between 56 and 58 in the centro. Chef Roberto Solís has used authenticated Melipona honey in desserts and in a dressing for a papaya salad that made me close my eyes involuntarily. He sources directly from keepers he knows by name. The tasting menu runs around 1,800 pesos.

Manjar Blanco, a market stall in Mercado Santiago (Calle 59 at the corner of 72), sells small jars of Melipona honey from a family in Maní. The owner, Doña Ligia, will tell you exactly which flowers the bees were foraging and what month the harvest took place. Jars run about 900 pesos for 300 ml.

Stay in Mérida

Top-rated hotels near Mérida

Best locations · Verified reviews · Free cancellation

View deals

Expedia →

6. The argument against calling this "superfood"

I need to say this plainly: the wellness-influencer pipeline is bad for Melipona honey. Every time someone on Instagram calls it a "sacred Mayan superfood" and links to a dubiously sourced jar on Amazon, the incentive structure tilts further toward extraction and away from stewardship. The families I met in Tekom are not branding consultants. They are not optimizing for export. They are managing fragile colonies in a destabilizing climate, and the last thing they need is a spike in demand driven by people who will move on to sea moss or whatever comes next.

Buy it in person, from someone who can tell you which hive it came from. Use it sparingly. Understand that its value is not as a wellness product but as a living artifact of a food system that predates European contact by at least a thousand years.

7. What to do with the rest of your day near Tekom

Honestly, not much, and that's the point.

Tekom is not a destination in the conventional sense. There is a colonial-era church on the plaza. There are a few tiendas selling refrescos and chips. The appeal is the quiet, the low sky, the sound of someone's radio drifting over a stone wall.

If you need a cenote — and in September, you will, because the humidity is like wearing a second body — Cenote Xcanché is about 40 minutes northwest, near Ek' Balam. Entrance is 120 pesos. It's run by a local ejido cooperative, the water is cool and green, and there are no DJs.

I made the mistake of trying to combine a meliponary visit with Chichén Itzá on the same day. Don't. The ruin site will eat your morning, your patience, and your goodwill toward humanity. Give Tekom its own day. Or at least its own afternoon.