Sugarbag: Native Stingless Bee Honey

Sugarbag is the honey produced by Australian native stingless bees (primarily Tetragonula carbonaria and Austroplebeia australis) — tiny bees that produce small quantities of a honey unlike any other on Earth. Aboriginal communities harvested sugarbag from tree hollows across tropical and subtropical Australia. The honey has a distinctly tangy, citric flavour with floral and resinous notes — nothing like the sweet, uncomplicated character of European honeybee (Apis mellifera) honey. Production is measured in grams per hive rather than kilograms — a single native stingless bee hive produces approximately 1kg of honey per year, compared to 30–50kg from a European honeybee hive.

Sugarbag honey is thin (more liquid than European honey), tangy (a pronounced lemon-like acidity from the high moisture and naturally occurring organic acids), and complex (floral, resinous, slightly fermented, with bush-specific aromatics depending on the region and the flowers the bees have visited). The colour ranges from pale amber to dark brown. It is stored by the bees in small cerumen pots (made from a mixture of wax and resin) rather than the hexagonal wax combs of European bees.

Sugarbag honey on native pepperberry-crusted kangaroo — the tangy, citric honey against the lean, iron-rich meat and the sharp mountain pepper. This is one of those rare combinations where every element is so specifically Australian that it could not exist anywhere else.