Stingless bees

[beehammer]

Stingless bees, guys.  Stingless bees!  Don't get too excited, though.  They can't really sting you, but they will bite the everloving shit out of you if you cross them.

They're kind of like a mid-grade bee.  Their hive arrangement is way more chill than the typical honeybee, but they're like type-A control-freak rage-monsters compared to like a bumblebee or a solitary bee.  Instead of the massive honeycombs and the worker bees flipping their shit thereon, stingless bees use the bumblebee/loose-hive plan of individual cell chambers and honeypots for brood-rearing and provisions.

Like their less-social, even-more-chill cousins, they produce honey, but they don't completely devote their lives to it.  There are only a few species that have proven worthwhile when it comes to human exploitation.  The rest of them are pretty much squarely in the "I got bitten a million times for this? Fuck my life." category*.

That doesn't mean they don't present an opportunity for casual collection, though.  The stingless bees that are native to Latin America have been sort-of tamed for thousands of years, insofar as something that takes care of itself and generally doesn't bite you can be described as tame.  The ones in Asia are more difficult to do more than just eat a little bit of honey out of, though they've also done a better job of keeping themselves alive.

*Killer bees also live in this category, but it's because they will kick the shit out of you at the least provocation, produce like 10% less honey than normal honey bees, and will abscond over absolutely minimal hive tampering.  They're still productive, they're just huge dicks about everything.