Begawan Bee Farm -- Stingless Bee Honey in Balangan, Bali

A green tropical scene with a path and wooden entrance and bee farm sign with painted and carved letters. — After a drive through built up neighborhoods we turn into a small parking lot and are presented with the entrance.

Wayan Indra stands beside an open beehive with a smile and a thumbs up. — Wayan Indra our beekeeper host, starts the tour by safely opening a beehive.

The entrance to Begawan Bee Farm is marked by a hand-painted sign on a piece of driftwood, hung between two posts in a garden arch of tangled vines and banana palms. The lettering says Welcome to Begawan Bee Farm. The path beyond it leads into a dense tropical compound in Desa Balangan, Kuwum, Mengwi -- a residential area of south Bali a few kilometres inland from Canggu. The address is Jl. Gatotkaca, and nothing about the lane suggests what is kept at the end of it.

Wayan Indra has been running the operation for two years. The farm itself is older -- it operated under a different name before Wayan took it over, and the hive stock predates him. He learned meliponiculture the way many small-scale keepers do here: through Facebook research, direct visits to other apiaries, and conversations with sellers at honey markets. He keeps two bee species and produces two distinct honeys. The primary operation is Apis cerana, the Asian honeybee native to Bali and Indonesia. The secondary one is Heterotrigona itama, the Sumatran-origin stingless bee now widely kept across western Indonesia. Both are on the property. The visit covers both.

Rectangular shallow wooden box with top peeled back to show the small round pots of honey and pollen — Metal top removed and covering pulled back to reveal a full hive of small round pots of honey and pollen and many stingless bees.

Closeup of the beehive interior covered in small black bees, quite calm. — Close up clearly shows open pots with yellow pollen or tranparent honey sooned to be closed.

Wayan opens one of the Itama hive boxes. The interior is fully occupied: hundreds of cerumen pots -- rounded vessels of beeswax and plant resin -- packed together across the floor of the box, each connected to its neighbors by thin resin bridges. The honey pots are sealed and dark. The pollen pots are open and bright, deep yellow, arranged in clusters across the surface. The bees move across the opened hive without alarm. No smoke, no protective gear. Stingless bees have no functional sting; there is nothing to protect against.

The pot structure is the defining characteristic of Meliponini honey production. Honey is stored in individual sealed cerumen vessels rather than open wax comb cells. Each pot holds a few millilitres. The honey inside these particular pots has been accumulating for longer than the two years Wayan has been keeping them -- the apiary infrastructure is older, and the hive boxes carry honey that the bees have been building and resin-loading since before the current operator arrived. This is why the colour runs so dark. Honey sitting in cerumen pots over an extended period absorbs more resin compounds from the pot walls. The longer it sits, the darker it becomes.

Billy stands closely to the hive with a short straw sipping honey straight from a pot. — Billy, the driver and translator brought me here because he knows the honey is pure. He eats a spoonful every day.

From the side we see Scott bending over the hive with a straw sipping honey from a pot. — I am getting the freshest sip of honey possible. A very small amount with a big taste.

Wayan produces a bundle of clear plastic straws. He selects one, inserts it directly through the sealed wall of a honey pot, and drinks. "You can try it. You can suck it here." Billy goes first. The honey rises through the straw in a slow dark thread. He drinks, looks up, gives a thumbs up. Then Scott. The honey from the pot is sour at the front of the mouth, sweet behind it, with a faint bitterness at the gums. It is thin -- noticeably thinner than Apis honey -- and the sourness arrives before anything else.

What is in the pot has not been heated, filtered, or mixed with anything. It is what the bees stored: stingless bee honey, raw, directly from the cerumen structure the colony built. The sourness is not incidental. Stingless bees build their honey pots from beeswax combined with plant resin, and that resin loads the stored honey with phenolic acids that produce the characteristic acidity distinguishing all Meliponini honey from the sweeter Apis product. The honey Wayan's Apis cerana colonies produce is different in every respect: lighter in colour, conventionally sweet, stored in open wax comb. He keeps both, sells both, and can explain the difference between them without hesitation.

Two bottles of honey. Left smaller and dark, the right tollar and light golden. — I bought the smaller of the two. Relatively quite expensive when questionable honey can be bought at a fraction.

Pouring the honey into a glass. — Poured quickly. Didn't look so dark by itself.

On the table at the end of the visit: two bottles, two labels, same beekeeper. The small dark bottle is Begawan Bee Farm, YANSU, 100ml, near-black in colour -- the Itama stingless bee honey, old hives, long-accumulated, the sourness and depth from both the resin chemistry and the time the honey has been sitting in the pots. The larger bottle is Madu Kelane Bali, YANSU, with a different WhatsApp number on the label -- a fresher Itama harvest, amber rather than near-black, lighter in character. Kelane is the Balinese word for stingless bee, the same root as kele kele at Sari Madu Sedana a few kilometres away. Both bottles are from the same hive boxes; the colour difference comes from which pots were opened and when.

The farm operated as Balangan Bee Farm under its prior owner and under that name supplied honey to three peer-reviewed academic studies published in 2024, all via Udayana University's UNISERF research program in collaboration with Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. Those papers characterised the Apis cerana honey from this address: moisture around 20 percent, pH between 3.40 and 6.10, free acidity at 76 meq/kg. The stingless bee honey was not part of that research. Wayan is the current operator. The hives are old. The honey is genuine. Contact: WhatsApp +62 831 1722 3396.