Tulum's bee god still watches, but the Melipona bees below him are disappearing

Above a doorway in Tulum's walled city, a stone figure plunges headfirst toward the ground, arms spread, something spilling from its hands. Many scholars read him as a bee god.

The building carries his name. It is called the Temple of the Descending God, and the same inverted figure turns up on other facades at Tulum, at Cobá, and at Tankah. The National Institute of Anthropology and History identifies him as Ah Muzen Cab, the descending deity of bees and of meliponiculture, shown carrying honeycomb panels in his hands. The historian Ralph Roys reached a similar conclusion decades earlier, tying the descending figure to the bee gods the Yucatec Maya called Mulzencab.

The reading is not unanimous. Some specialists argue that the figure represents Venus instead. What nobody disputes is the insect at the center of the argument, and that insect is in trouble. Melipona beecheii, the stingless bee the Maya called xunan kab, was kept on this coast long before Tulum's walls went up. In Quintana Roo, the number of colonies held in meliponaries fell by 93 percent between 1981 and 2004.

The stone has outlasted the hives.

Why the same inverted figure appears at Tulum, Cobá, and Tankah

Bees were not a marginal presence in Maya religion. INAH notes that Itzamná, the deity of wisdom, was also depicted holding the tools used to open hives. Ah Muzen Cab appears in the Chilam Balam, in the ritual of the four world corners and in the account of creation, where he stands for the east and the north.

The towns where the descending figure survives sat on a coastal trading route that moved honey and wax, goods valuable enough that Spanish administrators later collected them as tribute. Whatever the carving means, it was made in a place where honey was money.

Ten pages of the Madrid Codex belong to Melipona bees

Most of what is known about ancient Maya beekeeping survives in a single book. The Madrid Codex, also called the Tro-Cortesiano, runs to 112 pages, and ten of them deal with honey, with the deities attached to it, and with the raising of stingless bees. Its scenes are detailed enough that researchers have matched them to techniques still practiced in Yucatec villages.

The scale was serious. Researchers estimate that peninsular meliponaries reached as many as 500 hives. The federal agriculture ministry records that the Maya held between four and six ceremonies a year in honor of the bees.

A bee that bites instead of stinging

Xunan kab translates roughly as regal lady, or lady bee. The species has no stinger at all. When a colony is threatened, the workers bite, latch on, and die in the fight rather than let go. Melipona beecheii ranges from the Yucatán Peninsula down to Costa Rica, and Quintana Roo alone holds 16 of the 46 stingless bee species recorded in Mexico.

The meal offered to the hive after the harvest

Europe had a quieter version of the same instinct. Families in England, Ireland, and Germany told their bees about births, marriages, and deaths, on the belief that an uninformed hive would abandon the household or stop producing. The Maya did not only speak to their bees. They fed them, and they asked permission before opening the hive.

Keepers who follow the old practice hold a ceremony after the harvest called U Hanli Kab, which translates as the food of the bees, setting out sacred offerings for the colony, among them saká, a maize drink. Ethnographers recorded a second ceremony, u hedz luumil cab, performed when hives are moved or added.

The logic behind both is reciprocity. The honey belongs to the bees and to the deities who own them, and a keeper who takes it without thanks is understood to risk falling ill. It also explains a habit that serves as a form of conservation: the harvest never empties the colony.

Colonial authorities saw idolatry in all of it. Inquisition records from the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries describe backyard ceremonies involving hollow-log hives, candles made from local wax, and roots of the balché tree used to brew honey wine. Both the drink and the tree's planting were banned.

Stone lids found on the Maya Train route match the ones still in use

In 2024, salvage archaeology along Section 6 of the Maya Train, between Bacalar and Limones, turned up three stone lids believed to have sealed hives during the Postclassic, between 950 and 1539. Keepers in Quintana Roo still close their jobones the same way, with stone caps.

Some scholars read the jobón itself as a scale model of the Maya cosmos, with the celestial plane in the upper section where the brood sits, the earthly plane in the middle where the honey and pollen pots are stored, and the underworld beneath.

One and a half liters a year, and up to 1,500 pesos for it

A European honeybee hive can produce up to 30 liters of honey a year. A melipona hive produces roughly one and a half liters, and some stingless species yield as little as 40 or 50 milliliters. Harvest comes twice a year, and careful keepers draw only 30 to 40 percent of the stored supply, leaving the colony enough to survive the dry months.

Scarcity sets the price. Melipona honey sells for between 1,100 and 1,500 pesos a liter. Producers in Yucatán, meanwhile, said in May 2026 that conventional honey paid them around 32 pesos per liter.

The honey itself is thinner and more acidic than the supermarket kind, and it ferments, which is why it travels in small bottles and gets kept cold. Traditional medicine in the peninsula uses it for eye conditions, respiratory infections, and wounds. The pollen carries roughly 50 percent more protein than that of other bees, and the colonies pollinate habanero, achiote, avocado, squash, chayote, mango, and watermelon.

The 93 percent that vanished from Quintana Roo's meliponaries

The collapse is documented. Villanueva and colleagues calculated a 93 percent drop in the number of kept colonies between 1981 and 2004, and by the end of that period, only around 120 meliponicultores remained active in the state.

Current figures are better than that trough, though still modest. State agriculture authorities counted more than 175 producers with registered apiary brands in Quintana Roo in 2025, with 3,264 hives producing about 2,772 liters of melipona honey annually. The municipalities named include Felipe Carrillo Puerto, José María Morelos, Bacalar, Lázaro Cárdenas, Othón P. Blanco, Puerto Morelos, and Tulum.

Deforestation, pesticides, and a stronger competitor

INAH laid out the pressures in 2025: deforestation, insecticides and pesticides, monocultures and transgenic crops, destruction of wild nests, hurricanes, drought, and poor hive management. Producers in Yucatán have described meliponaries dying after the bees foraged in fields where herbicides had been applied.

Land clearing does the slow damage. Selective logging removes the large trees that Melipona beecheii nests in, and field studies in Quintana Roo found fewer stingless bee species in disturbed ecosystems than in well-conserved ones. Along the coast, construction has simply taken the habitat outright.

Where the jobones are still open near Tulum

The tradition has not been sealed behind glass. In Cobá, well under an hour from Tulum, a community project runs a melipona sanctuary alongside a cacao operation. Xcaret and Xel-Há keep working meliponaries on their grounds and harvest them twice a year; at Xel-Há, the harvest is opened by a Maya priest with copal, conch, and drums before the logs are unsealed. Near Akumal, a private foundation has spent more than a decade taking in colonies handed over by families who could no longer keep them, with the stated intention of eventually returning some to their communities.

Women are increasingly the ones tending them. Honey cooperatives led by Maya women have formed across the peninsula in recent years, a practice that was, for generations, the province of men.

The harvest ceremonies still follow the moon. They fall around June and December, close to the full moon, and it is then that a keeper decides how much to take and how much to leave. This December, in a handful of backyards in Quintana Roo, someone will set out a bowl of saká and thank the hive for the year. Whether anyone is still doing it in two generations depends on what is left standing around the logs.

Have you visited a meliponario near Tulum, or tasted melipona honey? Join the conversation and share your perspective with us on Instagram and Facebook at @thetulumtimes .