These bees don’t sting. Here’s why they matter

By José Carlos García Morales, Camino Verde (GLFx Amazonía Peruana)

It’s said that if, on a full moon night, you grab a queen bee, squeeze her abdomen and smear the liquid that comes out of her onto your eyelids, you’ll be able to temporarily see every bee’s nest out in the forest in the dark.

It’s also said that the best way to get rid of a nest of the haircutting bee arambaza (Trigona amalthea), is poop on the ground under the nest. 

That’s right – some say the odor will cause the nest to fall and the bees to flee, and then people can come harvest the honey! 

I’ve heard a lot of local stories and myths in my time studying and protecting bees.

It’s been more than 16 years since I first arrived in Loreto, the northernmost region of Peru, located in the Amazon rainforest. I was working on a final project for my agronomy degree in Spain.

I made countless visits to observe farms and their crops, analyzing agricultural issues like pests and diseases.

During one of these visits, a farmer told me about bees damaging their cashew apples. These bees bite the cashew fruit, reducing its marketability in the nearby town of Nauta, where these villagers sold their products.

Sometime later, on the banks of the Marañon River, in another community called San Jacinto, locals showed me a wooden box with insects going in and out. 

They wanted to open it to show me what was inside, but I was afraid of being stung – until they told me that those bees don’t sting. 

Imagine my astonishment when I saw with my own eyes a colony of bees that didn’t even try to sting us!

Back in the city of Iquitos, the regional capital of Loreto, where I had electricity and something resembling an internet connection, I researched these stingless bees, also known as meliponines.

A bit about stingless bees

I’ve been teaching about the breeding and keeping of native stingless bees for more than 13 years. I teach about bees across different river basins of the Amazon and in a significant number of communities, both native and mestizo. 

With its wide variety of ecosystems and biodiversity, the Amazon is also known as the world bank of stingless bees. These bees pollinate 38 to 90 percent of wild species in the Amazon region.

The Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon region have long known the legends of these native bees and how to extract their honey for food and medicine.

But these bees are important for other reasons too. They’re particularly sensitive to deforestation, making them a good indicator of forest health. They’re now increasingly difficult to find in higher-altitude jungle regions, where human activity is more extensive.

You might be wondering: what are these bees like? Although they don’t sting, and many are docile in behavior, they have other defensive strategies to protect themselves from potential predators. Nests are covered, usually sheltered in cavities or hollows within trees and surrounded by batumen – a hard substance made by the bees. 

The entrance to the nests is narrow and covered with repellent resins or seeds, thus preventing intruders from entering. The length of the entrance is a measure of how strong the hive is and constitutes an important defense mechanism, and the bees also defend themselves through various behavioral patterns.

Guardians bees permanently watch the nest entrances. When they feel attacked, the hive reacts en masse, either by hiding in the nest or by coming out to confront the aggressor. They shed sticky resins or become entangled in the intruder’s hair.

In healthy hives, the majority of bees dedicate themselves to producing honey.

But healthy hives are now becoming harder to come by.

What is meliponiculture?

Although the Peruvian Amazon is endowed with numerous natural resources, such as the honey-rich hives of stingless bees, they can sometimes be destroyed out of ignorance.

In the case of native stingless bee hives, colonies are often destroyed when local residents visit them to extract honey.

Most local people don’t know about sustainable beekeeping, and most government institutions, universities and research centers in Peru do not yet have programs for the study and promotion of meliponiculture – the breeding and management of stingless bees.

Meliponiculture in Peru is carried out traditionally, but its scale is minimal. Only in rare instances is there knowledge of how to multiply or strengthen a colony of stingless bees.

In Peru, Amazonian residents traditionally obtain honey from native bees by searching for wild nests in the jungle and eventually locating them, usually in the hollow of a trunk of a tree – dead or alive.

They then cut down the tree, open the trunk to gain access to the structure of the hive where the honey and pollen are located, and remove those products, including food for the brood cells.

This leaves the hive devastated in the middle of the forest, leaving it to die and taking entire populations with them.

In Indigenous and mestizo communities, native bee honey is sold in informal markets or exchanged for basic necessities. It is also used to prepare alcoholic beverages.

However, some Indigenous groups in the Amazon continue to use this honey for traditional medicines. 

The Kukama-Kukamiria, Shawi, Kichwa, Maijuna and mestizo peoples have recipes to cure or treat illnesses such as the flu, bronchitis, infertility, rheumatism, whooping cough, anemia and arthritis. They also use honey to strengthen the blood, body and spirit.

Some also collect the bee pollen for medicinal preparations. The beeswax was traditionally used to cover holes in canoes and to wax the string of hunting bows. Now, most wax, propolis and batumen are not used. Instead, these byproducts are typically thrown into the forest as waste despite their benefits and uses.

Native honey is usually sold in reused plastic bottles from soft drinks or other beverages. The price per bottle ranges from PEN 10–40 (USD 3–10), and they’re typically sold in one’s home community or nearby communities. Some producers or extractors sell honey in Iquitos, where they can charge higher prices.

Bee products like honey and pollen are sold in local markets at low cost and without sanitary control. Yet some civil institutions are recovering and enhancing traditional knowledge of meliponiculture, recognizing its value as a key link in the survival of Amazonian ecosystems.

The Maijuna people have a traditional song that references the native bee, imitating the buzzing sound of the bees on their daily rounds.

Thankfully, knowledge of meliponiculture is spreading and leading to more and more people becoming interested in the sustainable management and study of native Amazonian bees.

The future role of stingless bees in Peru

There is currently very little production of native bee honey in the Peruvian lowland rainforest and in Peru as a whole. Despite the high medicinal and commercial value of meliponine honey, meliponiculture has not yet been promoted in Peru as it has in Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. 

The use of bees and honey by local people is still part of daily life and traditional medicine in the Amazon, but with the disappearance of primary forest and the unsustainable extraction of beehives, Melipona stingless bees are no longer found in many parts of the high jungle. 

However, there is significant potential to embrace sustainable meliponiculture and commercialize this honey in Peru. There is already high local demand for this product, with Peru importing hundreds of thousands of kilograms of honey annually. 

In addition, many studies point to meliponiculture as an effective measure to protect tropical forests through pollination. 

The full diversity of native bees existing in the Peruvian Amazon has still to be documented. However, several civil institutions, including Camino Verde, are working to gather this data and document more of the honey’s medicinal uses among native communities.

With more education and awareness about managing these bee populations, we hope Peru can eventually benefit from a stronger rural economy that preserves both native ecosystems and the traditional customs of its Indigenous communities.