[Community] Re: Bee Questionnaire for Ryan and Research Paper on indigenous and academic knowledge on bees in the Amazon

Hi Ryan and Team, As a follow up to our bee meeting today here is the Gdoc link to edit for questions to indigenous beekeeping groups. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xS0Jz54dB4K3xs5pRAi4YuNywB247xg415oP5... I have a contact that works with a large portion of native american tribes in the midwest and I will ask him to pass along the questionnaire once completed. Also attached in a research paper about brazilian indigenous beekeeping practices and history and how the introduction of the africanized bees affected them. It is more about the cultural than scientific but I enjoyed it. Here are some of the highlights. Apis mellifera in Brazil occurred around 1839 by the Portuguese, mainly by the Jesuits priests, primarily for wax extraction for candle production used for religious purposes [22]. In 1845, German colonizers brought over more bees, beginning apiculture in the south of Brazil [22]. Following these events, other colonizers also brought European bees to different Brazilian regions, some of them unregistered. Until the middle of 20 th Century, the European A. mellifera did not disperse be- yond the locations where it was introduced. The Brazilian government asked Dr. Warwick Kerr, a biologist and geneticist, to “create” a bee that could pro- duce more honey in tropical environments. In 1956, Dr. Warwick Kerr led an expedition to South Africa and Zimbabwe and brought 36 African queens to an agricul- tural research station in the State of São Paulo. By inter- breeding the queens through artificial insemination with European drones, Kerr and his associates produced a number of first generation hybrids. After several months, their stock of Africanized honey bees was reduced to 29 and they were maintained in hive boxes equipped with queen excluders. In October of 1957, a local beekeeper noticed the queen excluders and removed them, acci- dentally releasing 26 Africanized honey bee queens with small swarms to the forest nearby [22, 23]. There was no way to find these “lost queens” again. This incident changed the history of bees and beekeepers foreve In 2001, Xingu honey trademarked as “Mel dos Índios do Xingu” (Xingu Indigenous Honey) was certified as an organic product by the Instituto Biodinâmico (IBD), be- coming the first indigenous product to be labelled as or- ganic in Brazil, and receiving the seal from the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture (SIF). In 2015, apiculture was the most successful market activity developed in Xingu Park, involving around 24 villages and 5 indigenous groups. In 2011, around 900 kg of Xingu indigenous honey was sold to Pão de Açúcar, a well-known Brazilian supermarket chain [50]. The Xingu Indigenous Park was created in 1961 by the Brazilian government. It has an area of 2,642,003 ha within the Xingu River watershed, in a transitional zone between the savannas and the Amazonian tropical forest (Fig. 1). Fourteen indigenous groups live within the Park’s limits, totaling 4,829 people in 2011 [48]. The vegetation of Xingu Park is composed of a mosaic of various ecozones such as savannas, flooded forests, non- flooded forests, palm groupings and forests on growing on “black earth” or anthropogenic soils [49]. The apiculture activity began in Xingu Park in 1996 through the Fundação Mata Virgem, incorporated by the Brazilian NGO Instituto Socioambiental 1 in 1997 (ISA). Initially, few beehive boxes were installed in bigger villages. In each village, men interested in working as beekeepers began to receive specialized technical training through collaboration with practitioners and technicians from APACAME,2 an association of beekeepers from São Paulo State (Associação Paulista de Apicultores Criadores de Abelhas Melíficas Europeias) In Kayapo cosmology, an ancient shaman called “wayanga” taught their ances- tors how to live, work and defend themselves like social insects, gaining his knowledge observing bee, wasp and ant behavior [45, 60]. Traditional circular villages are said by the Kayapo to take the cross-sectional form of conical nests of wasps and bees. Studying Kayapo’s knowledge on bees and insects, Darrell Posey [42] ob- served that bee specialists among the Kayapo from Gorotire were all shamans. There are many taboos in regards to honey consump- tion and honey gathering. The Ikpeng say that some bees are very dangerous and that their spirits keep strange things such as dead bugs, rat skulls, snake skulls, monkey skulls etc. Especially when a couple has a small baby or little kids, they can’t consume honey, because it can cause sickness and even death to the child. An important aspect linking the diversity of bees with landscape patchiness refers to the role of indi- genous societies in creating, enhancing and maintain- ing biodiversity at local and landscape scales, through biocultural co-evolution. Evidence from previous research has shown that indigenous management practices linked to rotation of settlements and swidden-fallow agriculture have enhanced the patchi- ness and diversity of vegetation types, plant species and niches for animal species, including bees, in the Amazon [67–72]. Indigenous management practices, intertwined with their belief systems and worldviews, have enhanced the diversity of ecozones and habitats for bee species in the Amazon Thanks, Dennis