Walk into most commercial apiaries in India today and you’ll meet a bee that isn’t originally from here at all: Apis mellifera, the European or “Italian” honeybee, imported for its generous honey yields. We took a different road. At Thenthulli we keep the native Indian bee, Apis cerana indica. It’s a deliberate choice, and an honest comparison of the two explains why.
Meet the two bees
Apis cerana indica is the honeybee that has lived in India for as long as anyone can remember — smaller-bodied, at home in tropical heat and monsoon, and the traditional bee of Kerala’s forests and homesteads. Apis mellifera is a larger bee, brought to India from Europe in the twentieth century and now the backbone of large-scale commercial honey production because it builds bigger colonies and stores more honey.
Neither is “better” in every way. They’re suited to different goals. Here’s the fair version.
Where the Italian bee wins
We’ll say it plainly: if raw tonnage of honey is your only goal, the imported bee has the edge.
- Higher yield: it builds larger colonies and stores considerably more surplus honey per hive.
- Easier scaling: its productivity and steadier behaviour on the frame make it the practical choice for industrial apiaries.
- Less swarming and absconding: native cerana colonies are more inclined to swarm, and to abscond when disturbed or short of forage — which takes more skill to manage.
This is exactly why so much of India’s commodity honey comes from mellifera. It’s a volume bee.
Where the native bee wins
But volume was never our goal — character, resilience and belonging were. And on those, the native bee is hard to beat.
Adapted to Kerala
Apis cerana evolved here. It handles Kerala’s humidity, heat and long monsoon dearth in its stride, forages a wide sweep of local flora, and doesn’t depend on imported stock or heavy intervention to survive our conditions.
Natural defences
The native bee brings its own toolkit. It is the original host of the Varroa mite and tolerates it far better than the Italian bee, which suffers badly from Varroa worldwide. And Apis cerana has a remarkable defence against predatory hornets: when one attacks, dozens of workers mob it into a tight ball and vibrate their flight muscles, cooking the intruder to death with heat it can’t withstand. The imported bee has no such defence against Asian hornets.
Distinctive honey, and a lighter footprint
Because it forages such varied local flora in modest quantities, the native bee gives honey of real delicacy and complexity — our Rubber Flora and Wild Forest honeys are its work. Keeping native bees also supports local pollination and biodiversity rather than introducing a competing exotic species.
Our choice
For a brand built on Kerala terroir rather than tonnage, the native bee is the only honest choice. It gives us less honey, and better honey — honey that could only come from these hills, made by the bee that belongs to them. That trade, for us, isn’t close.