Indonesia Honey

The honeys those forests produce are genuinely unlike anything that reaches the international market, and the reason is structural. The dominant species, Apis dorsata, builds open nests in the crowns of emergent trees, absconds when disturbed, and will not tolerate a box. Every gram arrives by a climber from a wild colony. Indonesia tracked 18,430 liters of forest honey in 2024 while its people consumed somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 tons the same year – importing the rest from Thailand, Argentina, and Vietnam. The forests hold far more than the market has learned to reach.

Indonesia holds five wild honeybee species, more than any other country in the region. Beyond Apis dorsata, Apis cerana nests in cavities and yields to box management but produces far less per colony. Apis florea, the dwarf honey bee – called tawon lanceng in Java – occupies exposed low nests and produces small quantities. The stingless bees of the Meliponini tribe, collectively kelulut or klanceng by region, produce the sour, resin-inflected madu kelulut now growing as a commercial category under pesantren cultivation programs. Apis mellifera, introduced by Dutch colonial agents in 1841, runs the managed commercial farms. The production ceiling exists because the species with the highest yield per colony – Apis dorsata – is the one that cannot be farmed.

The nectar landscape behind that honey is unlike any other country in the region. Indonesia has no single dominant forage plant at the national level. Each island system generates its own honey identity from its own forest. In Riau and Kalimantan the sialang tree (Koompassia excelsa) serves as both the preferred nesting site of Apis dorsata – its smooth, soaring trunk reaching 88 meters deters predators – and a protected species under the adat tenure systems of communities like the Petalangan, who prohibit felling it as long as bees nest there. In Bangka Tengah the pelawan (Tristaniopsis merguensis), a tree entirely absent from Java, produces a bitter nectar that gives Madu Pelawan its flavor and, increasingly, its legal identity: the village of Namang was pursuing geographic indication registration for Madu Pelawan with DJKI and JICA support as of July 2024, the first named forest honey origin in Indonesia to do so. In Danau Sentarum the annual flood-and-flower cycle of a 132,000-hectare freshwater wetland drives a honey calendar tied to the sequential blooming of putat, emasung, and taun. In Java the kapuk randu (Ceiba pentandra), once the dominant commercial forage plant for Apis mellifera hives, has declined to roughly eleven percent of its former cultivated area since the 1980s as land use shifted – the single largest structural change to the commercial honey industry in the country’s recent history.

The harvest traditions that have grown around Apis dorsata are the most elaborated in Southeast Asia. The menumbai ceremony of the Petalangan people of Riau requires a specialist – the juagan tuo – who addresses the colony in alternating pantun verse before cutting into the comb, personifying the bees as a beautiful girl and asking her permission. The tradition is performed at night, in darkness, without modern protective gear, and has been declared a national intangible cultural heritage. The muar ceremony of Ketapang, Kalimantan Barat, uses a bamboo ladder called jatak and a spoken prayer for safety – timang madu – as the harvester descends. In Aceh the BPNB documented the Buloh Seuma community’s relationship with the reubek tree and its colonies in a 2022 monograph, framing the harvest as a system of obligations to a forest understood to hold power the harvester must acknowledge. In Nusa Tenggara Timur the Bijoba Sonav poem in the Dhawan language records bee abundance as a sign of regional prosperity, and the Dhawan practice includes a ritual call to invite bees to inhabit trees before the harvest begins. These traditions operate as governance systems: they set harvest timing, impose prohibitions that prevent overharvesting, and maintain the relationship between the community and the colony that makes next season’s harvest possible.

The Islamic framework inside which most Indonesian honey culture operates adds a second governance layer. Honey appears in Surah An-Nahl as a product created by divine instruction to the bee, and this theological grounding makes it a cornerstone of Thibbun Nabawi – the Prophetic medicine tradition organizing health practice for many Indonesian Muslim families. The Sandro Madu of Sumbawa is its clearest institutional expression: an Islamic healer whose practice centers on Sumbawa forest honey as a therapeutic material whose authority comes not from certification but from a framework the patient shares. The same grounding has made stingless bee cultivation a natural fit for the approximately 26,000 pesantren (Islamic boarding schools) across Indonesia. Bank Indonesia has funded kelulut programs at pesantren as a rural economic development model, piloted at institutions in Bengkulu, Sulawesi Selatan, and Nusa Tenggara Barat. The University of Indonesia research team that developed the program described it as a model for pesantren economic independence – kemandirian pesantren – that also sustains pollination ecology wherever the schools operate.

The documentation and market infrastructure for Indonesian forest honey concentrates around two institutions. JMHI (Jaringan Madu Hutan Indonesia), with its national secretariat at Yayasan Riak Bumi in Pontianak, has built traceable supply chains for Apis dorsata honey producers across Kalimantan, Sumatera, Sulawesi, Jawa, and Sumbawa since 2000. In 2007 the APDS cooperative in Danau Sentarum received the first organic certification ever issued to an Indonesian forest honey producer – BIOCert certification, presented at a Ministry of Forestry ceremony by the minister himself. The 28,000-hectare periau (honey forest) under APDS management represents the most documented community-managed forest honey system in the country. Desa Namang in Bangka Tengah is the other significant pole: a village that enacted its own forest protection regulation in 2008 (Perdes protecting the Hutan Pelawan), received the Adi Karya Pangan Nusantara award in 2013, and was working with Kemenkumham and JICA toward a geographic indication for Madu Pelawan Namang in 2024. Both institutions represent the same underlying logic: the way to give Indonesian forest honey a durable market identity is to attach it to a named place with documented stewardship, not to extract it from a forest with no named owner.

Travel Hints

Specific travel guidance – where to go in each region, when the honey season falls, which producers welcome visitors, how to reach the forests and markets – lives in the regional pages that follow. If you are planning a trip to encounter Indonesian honey in the field, or looking for a specific honey type and what it means, the regional cards below are the right next step for both purposes.