Country

Colombia

Colombia's mountains make its honey story vertical. Government reporting in 2024 estimated about 163,215 hives and 6,599 tonnes of honey annually, with Antioquia, Sucre, Meta, Huila and Córdoba accounting for roughly half of national production. Yet some of the most interesting systems lie outside simple production rankings. In the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, producer associations keep both ordinary honeybees and native stingless bees such as the Angelita, Tetragonisca angustula. High in the Eastern Cordillera, another extraordinary honey appears in fragmented forests of the native Colombian oak, Quercus humboldtii: sap-feeding Stigmacoccus asper insects produce honeydew that honeybees collect, creating a dark, intensely flavored forest honey. Colombia's Africanized honeybees have also been studied genetically for adaptation to high elevations. Add a national registration system that geolocates both Apis and native stingless-bee operations, and Colombia starts looking less like one honey market and more like a stacked ecological map.