The Himalayan Giant Honey Bee: Cliff Nester of Asia

The Himalayan giant honey bee (Apis laboriosa) is the world's largest honey bee, and instead of a hive or a hollow tree it nests in the open on cliff faces high in the Himalaya. Colonies are typically found at roughly two thousand to three thousand metres in Nepal, Bhutan, northern India and south-western China, each one hanging as a single sheet of wax comb, on the biggest nests more than a metre across, fixed to a bare rock overhang. We drew it for the Naturalist Series because it shows how much variety sits inside the word "honey bee".

A bee with a name and a history of confusion

Its scientific name is Apis laboriosa, described by Frederick Smith in 1871. The Latin means "laborious" or hard-working, which is a fair description of a bee that lives at the edge of what honey bees can manage. For a long time many authorities treated it as a mountain form of the giant honey bee of the lowlands, Apis dorsata. Later work on body size, structure and behaviour led most researchers to treat it as a species in its own right, and that is how it is usually listed today. It is worth saying that this was a genuine scientific disagreement, and you will still find older books that fold the two together.

Both belong to the small group of true giant honey bees in the genus Apis. The genus is a short list. There are the giant bees (dorsata, laboriosa and, in the Philippines, breviligula), the dwarf bees (florea and andreniformis), and the cavity-nesting bees, which include the western honey bee, Apis mellifera, and the eastern honey bee, Apis cerana. Giant and dwarf bees share one habit that the others have dropped: they build a single exposed comb rather than several combs in the dark.

Where it lives

The Himalayan giant honey bee is a bee of the high country of southern and south-eastern Asia. It is recorded along the Himalayan range in Nepal, Bhutan and northern India, in south-western China, and in the mountains of neighbouring countries such as northern Myanmar and northern Vietnam. Exact limits at the edges of that range are still debated, so we will not draw a hard line on a map.

What is well established is that it is the true altitude specialist among the giant bees. Its nests are typically reported at roughly two thousand to three thousand metres above sea level, with records both lower and higher. That is far above where Apis dorsata commonly lives. The bees have the size to help them here: a larger body holds heat better in cool, thin air, and the biggest workers are the largest of any honey bee, with a length in the region of two centimetres. Put one beside a worker from a British hive and the difference is plain.

The bees also appear to move with the seasons. Observers in Nepal have reported colonies leaving cliffs at higher altitude and settling lower down in the colder months, then returning. That kind of altitudinal migration is not something we would expect of a bee in a hive box, and it is one of the least studied parts of its life, so we hold it lightly.

How it builds and lives

Choose the right cliff, and the colony builds one comb, hanging from an overhang or the underside of a rock ledge. The comb is a single vertical sheet, and on the biggest nests it can be more than a metre across. It is sheltered from rain by the rock above but otherwise open to the air. Nothing hides it. What protects it is the bees themselves.

The surface of the comb is covered by layers of workers, packed shoulder to shoulder, forming what is often called the bee curtain. The outer layers face out and act as the defence. Beneath them the working life of the nest goes on: brood is raised on the comb, pollen and nectar are stored, and honey is capped at the top, where the comb is thickest. Because the whole structure is exposed, the curtain also has a role in temperature. The bees are, in a real sense, the walls and the roof.

Giant honey bee colonies are known for a defensive display called shimmering. When a threat approaches, a wave of raised abdomens passes across the surface of the curtain in a fraction of a second, like a ripple over standing corn. It is a visual warning, and it can travel across the whole nest faster than an individual bee could move. Anyone who has watched a video of it once tends to remember it. The same protective instinct helps explain why these bees can respond forcefully when a colony is disturbed, which is one reason the species has never been managed in hives the way we handle our own bees.

Another point that matters for the bee's reputation: many colonies can sit close together. Cliffs with a good overhang may carry a scattering of nests, sometimes a considerable number, within sight of each other. This gathering habit has been recorded in the giant bees generally, and the Himalayan species is no exception. It gives the rock face a look that is hard to describe, like a hanging wall of dark slate that turns out to be alive.

How it differs from the western honey bee

It is easy to say "bigger" and stop. The differences are more interesting than that, and a beekeeper will notice them at once.

• The nest. The western honey bee builds several parallel combs inside a cavity, in darkness. The Himalayan giant honey bee builds a single comb in the open, on rock.
• The size. The giant bee is markedly larger, and its comb cells are larger too. A frame from a British hive would be far too small a unit for it.
• The keeping. Western honey bees, and to a degree the eastern honey bee, can be kept in hives. The giant bees, including this one, have resisted every attempt at domestication. Their colonies are wild, and they may abandon a site altogether.
• The range. Apis mellifera was originally native to Europe, Africa and parts of western Asia, and has since been carried across the world. Apis laboriosa stays in its mountains.

A less obvious difference is in the way a bee communicates. Honey bees are famous for the waggle dance, in which a returning forager tells her nestmates where to find food. The western honey bee dances in the dark on a vertical comb inside the hive, and the nestmates follow by touch. Giant honey bees dance on an open comb, where the light of the sky reaches them. It is the same language in a different setting, and a reminder that the dance, like the nest, evolved to fit where the bee lives.

The bee and the people who know it

Because the bee is wild and the cliffs are steep, its relationship with people has always been an unusual one. In parts of Nepal, honey hunting from cliff nests is a long-standing tradition, carried out by particular communities, among them the Gurung and Kulung Rai peoples. Hunters have been recorded working from ladders of plaited rope or bamboo let down the rock, using smoke to calm the bees and a long pole to cut sections of comb. This is a skilled craft handed down between people, with its own seasons and its own rules, and it is documented in photographs and ethnographic work. We would not presume to describe its ceremonies or beliefs in detail, since they belong to the people who practise them.

Honey hunting is also a subject on which it is easy to be careless. Stories about these bees can drift into legend quickly, and some of them cannot be supported. We have kept to what is recorded and left out what is not. In particular, we make no claims about honey or other bee products, and we do not make conservation claims that we cannot back with a source. What we can say honestly is that this is a species living in a place that is hard to reach, whose daily life is still only partly understood, and that a great deal of what we know about it comes from patient field observation on rock faces most of us will never see.

There is a quiet lesson in that for anyone who keeps bees. A colony in a hive is a managed thing, small in scale and close to hand. A colony on a cliff is the older pattern: exposed, self-defended and answerable to weather. Knowing that both belong to one genus makes each of them more interesting. It also explains why a beekeeper's instinct to open the lid and look is so seldom possible with the giant bees.

The plate

The plate that goes with this article shows the Himalayan giant honey bee as digital engraving-style artwork. It is a modern piece of work drawn in the manner of natural-history engraving, and it is not an antique or a historical original. We drew it because the bee deserves the careful, patient treatment that a naturalist would have given it: the body, the banding, the scale. The design is available in the Hive Heritage shop, and you can see it below.

See it in the Naturalist Series: The Himalayan Giant Honey Bee plate