Beekeeping with Indigenous People in the Amazon

I just returned from Peru and am more energized than ever about our stingless beekeeping project given the incredible progress that I observed in Maijuna lands. The biggest surprise was a new meliponario (the name in Spanish for an area with several stingless bee hives) that one of our star Maijuna beekeepers has set up. Duglas (pictured here), the owner of the meliponario, has always been one of our star students but he is really pushing himself to reach new heights. With 30 hives in total, he now owns the largest meliponario in Maijuna lands and has really set the bar for the other Maijuna stingless beekeepers to shoot for.

Over the past 5 months alone, he has harvested and sold 150 2-oz bottles of stingless bee honey. Based on the premium pricing structure that we established with an ecotourism lodge (ExplorNapo Lodge) in the area, this has earned him $450 in total (each 2-oz bottle of honey is worth $3, which is ten times what they would earn on the regional market). Given that the average annual household income in Maijuna lands was only $500 at the start of our project, Duglas has almost doubled his annual income in less than half the year! Duglas and his wife Lesley have a 4-month-old baby and this newfound income is helping them to pay for monthly boat trips for their baby’s medical checkups. This is real sustainable income, helping real people!

Please help us support the other Maijuna beekeepers to reach the heights that Duglas has achieved. New families are looking to join the beekeeping project and funding travel costs to their communities to train and support them is only $250. Any level of support helps and we cannot thank you enough for your continued support!

This year, one of our main goals has been to expand the reach of our stingless beekeeping project in Maijuna lands and we have been hard at work making this happen. When we started this project over 2 years ago, we wanted to be very deliberate and thoughtful about how, when, and where to grow. Many well-intentioned sustainable development projects fail around the world because they try to grow too big, too fast. Taking these lessons to heart, we only wanted to expand our project once we had strong proof of concept and buy-in from the Maijuna. Seeing both things on-the-ground made us confident that we were more than ready to expand into two more Maijuna communities.

Before expanding into these two communities, we engaged in thoughtful discussion and planning with community elders and leaders to make sure that they were fully onboard with the project and knew what to expect. Since developing common goals and expectations, our team has held several community-level workshops in both communities focused on teaching proper husbandry and management techniques as well as the biology and ecology of stingless bees. We have also been engaged in family-level work, which has consisted of working closely with interested beekeepers and their families to help them setup and maintain their hives. There is still much work to be done and many more community-level workshops and family-level sessions to conduct but we are incredibly excited by our progress to date. In these two communities, over 70 individuals from ages 7 to 78 have been actively engaged in the project and these budding beekeepers are now tending over 24 hives. Before starting work in these communities, no one was tending stingless bees and there were no hives in the communities. We truly think the sky’s the limit based on this strong start!

We are incredibly excited about how this year has unfolded and we know that the Maijuna are too. Seeing the interest, passion, and dedication of the new Maijuna beekeepers has not only been fun to see but it has also been inspiring and energizing. Please help us achieve the Maijuna’s vision for a more sustainable future by continuing to support our stingless beekeeping project. As we move into the holiday season, we can think of nothing better or more meaningful than to sponsor a hive of native stingless bees ($50) or a week-long beekeeping workshop ($1,000) in the name of a loved one. Any level of support helps and we cannot thank you enough for your continued support!