Stingless bees from the Amazon granted legal rights in world first | Bees

Amazonian stingless bees have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, a breakthrough that supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar measures to protect bees elsewhere.

This means that across a large swath of the Peruvian Amazon, long-neglected native rainforest bees – which, unlike their European bee cousins, do not have stingers – now have the right to exist and thrive.

Cultivated by indigenous peoples since pre-Columbian times, stingless bees are considered the primary pollinators of rainforests, supporting biodiversity and ecosystem health.

But they face a deadly confluence of climate change, deforestation and pesticides, as well as competition from European bees, and scientists and activists are racing against time to put stingless bees on international conservation red lists.

Constanza Prieto, Latin American director of the Earth Law Center, which was part of the campaign, said: “This ordinance marks a turning point in our relationship with nature: it makes stingless bees visible, recognizes them as rights-bearing subjects, and affirms their essential role in preserving ecosystems. »

The first global ordinances, passed in two regions of Peru in recent months, follow a research and advocacy campaign led by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional, who has spent the past several years traveling to the Amazon to work with indigenous people to document bees.

Espinoza, a chemical biologist, began researching bees in 2020, after a colleague asked him to conduct an analysis of their honey, which was being used during the pandemic in indigenous communities where treatments for Covid were scarce. She was stunned by the results.

“I was seeing hundreds of medicinal molecules, like molecules known to have some sort of biological medicinal property,” Espinoza recalls. “And the variety was also very wild: these molecules are known to have anti-inflammatory or antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant, even anticancer effects.”

Espinoza, who wrote a book, The Spirit of the Rainforest, about his work in the Amazon, began leading expeditions to learn about stingless bees, working with indigenous people to document traditional methods of foraging and cultivating the insects and harvesting their honey.

Found in tropical regions around the world, stingless bees, a class that encompasses a number of varieties, are the oldest species of bee on the planet. About half of the world’s 500 known species live in the Amazon, where they are responsible for pollinating more than 80% of the flora, including crops such as cocoa, coffee and avocado.

They also hold deep cultural and spiritual significance for the indigenous Asháninka and Kukama-Kukamiria people of the forest. “Within the stingless bee lives traditional indigenous knowledge, passed down from the time of our grandparents,” said Apu Cesar Ramos, president of EcoAshaninka of the Ashaninka Communal Reserve. “The stingless bee has existed since time immemorial and reflects our coexistence with the rainforest.”

Early on, Espinoza heard reports that bees were becoming increasingly difficult to find. “We were actively talking to different members of the community and the first thing they would say, and they still do today, is: ‘I can’t see my bees anymore. It used to take me 30 minutes of walking in the jungle to find them. And now it takes me hours.'”

His chemical analysis also revealed worrying results. Traces of pesticides appeared in the honey of stingless bees, even though they were raised in areas far from industrial agriculture.

The lack of awareness about stingless bees makes it difficult to obtain research funding, Espinoza said. So, alongside the start of fieldwork, she and her colleagues began advocating for recognition of the insects, both in Peru and with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

For years, the only officially recognized bee species in Peru were European bees, introduced to the continent by colonizers in the 1500s.

“It’s almost created a vicious cycle. I can’t give you the funding because you’re not on the list, but you can’t even get on the list because you don’t have the data. You don’t have the funding to get it.” In 2023, they officially launched a project to map the extent and ecology of bees, “because by that time we had already spoken with the IUCN team and some Peruvian government officials and understood that this data was essential.”

Mapping revealed links between deforestation and the decline of stingless bees – research that contributed to the passage of a law in 2024 recognizing stingless bees as Peru’s native bees. The law is a crucial step, as Peruvian law requires the protection of native species.

Dr César Delgado, a researcher at the Peruvian Amazon Investigation Institute, described stingless bees as “primary pollinators” in the Amazon, contributing not only to plant reproduction but also to biodiversity, forest conservation and global food security.

But their research also revealed something else.

An experiment in Brazil in the 1950s to create a variety capable of producing more honey in tropical conditions led to the creation of the Africanized bee – a variety that was also more aggressive, earning it the fearsome nickname “African killer bees.” Espinoza and his colleagues found that these Africanized bees began to outcompete the relatively gentle stingless bees in their own habitat.

On an expedition to the Amazonian highlands of Junin in southern Peru, they met Elizabeth, an Asháninka elder, who told them of what Espinoza considered “the most striking example of [bee] species competition I have ever seen.

Living a semi-nomadic lifestyle in a remote part of the Avireri Vraem Biosphere Reserve, Elizabeth cultivated and raised bees in a forest location some distance from her home. But she described how her stingless bees had been displaced by Africanized bees, who attacked her violently each time they visited.

“I was so scared, to be honest,” Espinoza said. “Because I’ve heard about it before, but not to this extent. She had horrified eyes and she kept looking right at me and asking, ‘How can I get rid of it?’ I hate them. I want them to disappear.”

It was the municipality where Elizabeth lives, Satipo, that was the first to pass an ordinance in October granting legal rights to stingless bees. In the Avireri Vraem Reserve, bees will now have the right to exist and thrive, maintain healthy populations, benefit from a healthy, pollution-free habitat, ecologically stable climatic conditions and, above all, to be legally represented in the event of threat or harm. A second municipality, Nauta, in the Loreto region, approved a corresponding ordinance on Monday, December 22.

These orders constitute precedents without equivalent in the world. According to Prieto, they will establish a mandate demanding policies for the survival of bees, “including reforestation and habitat restoration, strict regulation of pesticides and herbicides, mitigation and adaptation to the impacts of climate change, advancement of scientific research, and adoption of the precautionary principle as a guiding framework for all decisions that may affect their survival.” »

Already, a global petition from Avaaz calling on Peru to pass a nationwide law has reached more than 386,000 signatures, and groups in Bolivia, the Netherlands and the United States have also shown strong interest, wanting to follow the example of municipalities as a basis for defending the rights of their own wild bees.

Ramos said: “The stingless bee provides us with food and medicine, and this needs to be made known so that more people protect it. For this reason, this law that protects bees and their rights represents a big step forward for us, because it gives value to the experience of our indigenous peoples and the rainforest.”