Workers usually measure about 17–20 millimetres, considerably larger than a western honey bee. They have a dark thorax and an abdomen banded in orange-brown and black.
It lives in tropical and subtropical Asia: from Pakistan across the Indian subcontinent and Sri Lanka to southern China, Indochina, Indonesia and parts of the Philippines. It does not reach New Guinea or Australia.
The nest is a single comb hanging in the open beneath a stout branch, rock overhang or roof, usually 3–25 metres above the ground. The comb can be around 1.5 metres long and is covered by a curtain of workers several layers deep. A single tall tree or cliff may hold many nests side by side.
Its defence is a spectacle: when a hornet approaches, thousands of bees on the curtain flip up their abdomens in rapid succession and a wave ripples across the nest. If seriously threatened they attack and sting en masse. Colonies move between areas during the year as different plants flower, often returning to the same sites.
It cannot be kept in a hive, so for thousands of years its honey has been hunted from wild nests: in the Sundarbans of Bangladesh and India, from towering tualang trees in Malaysia, and on the islands of Indonesia. In Vietnam 'rafter beekeeping' has taken hold: people put up sloping poles on which swarms settle of their own accord, then harvest the honey several times.