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/1xS0Jz54dB4K3xs5pRAi4YuNywB247xg415oP5pbQpjc/edit?usp=sharing

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