Guardians of the Stingless Bees: Exploring the Mission to Sustain Melipona Bee Populations (Ep. 49)

In the heart of the Yucatan Peninsula, an extraordinary effort is underway to save a unique and crucial pollinator: the melipona bee. This tropical stingless bee is not just vital for biodiversity but deeply intertwined with the Mayan culture. Join us as we venture into the world of melipona bees and explore the Mayan Melipona Bee Sanctuary. The Sanctuary’s Founder, Rebecca Robertson shares her inspiring story of how community, culture, and conservation efforts intertwine to protect these special bees. Discover the challenges faced by this crucial pollinator, their significant role in the Mayan ecosystem, and how you can contribute to this fascinating preservation project. 

Explore more about the Mayan Melipona Bee Sanctuary on their website and see how you can support the work they do. You can also follow them on Facebook or check out their YouTube channel.

Good to know

In the episode, Rebecca referred to this stingless bee as melipona beecheii. It’s one of 16 stingless bee species that inhabit the forests of the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico. Its name in Yucatec Maya is Xunan-Kab which means Royal Lady Bee. They are excellent rainforest pollinators and critical to the local ecosystem, but deforestation is impacting wild populations.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Welcome to The Bee’s Knees, a podcast wild about native bees. Wild and native bees are under threat worldwide. In each episode, we look at actionable things we can do to support these adorable little guys whose pollination work is crucial for maintaining biodiversity. I’m Jacy Meyer and I thank you for being here.

One of the best things about having a little podcast about bees is the opportunity to virtually visit special places all over the world and meet their native bees. Today we are heading to Mexico to meet the melipona, a stingless honeybee. The genus melipona consists of about 70 different species, native primarily to South America.

The largest producer of honey for melipona bees in Mexico is in the state of Yucatan, which is also home to the Mayan Melipona Bee Sanctuary. Our guest today is the sanctuary’s founding director, Rebecca Robertson. [00:01:00] Can you please introduce us to the melipona bee? Sure. The melipona bee, known in the Mayan language as Xunan-Kab, is the primary pollinator of the rainforest of the Yucatan of Mexico.

Um, she is a tropical stingless bee. This bee has been in relationship with the Maya people documented for over 3, 000 years. So what is your connection with the melipona bee? I was invited to go on a Sister Cities delegation trip in 2020. The town where I live, Asheville, North Carolina, is a sister city with Valladolid, Mexico, which is Very close to the Mayan site [00:02:00] of Chichén-Itzá.

And I am a beekeeper. I have Apis mellifera bees, so I’m very familiar with bees. And my teacher, Lane Redman, had written a book years ago. About the sacred path of the bee and the connection of drumming goddess temples and bees. So I have both of these, I’m holding both of these teachings in my head. So when I went to Mexico, I already knew about the Mayan bees and knew about their relationship with the Maya people and the.

Connection with the sacred Mayan texts, the Madrid Kodis, and I started asking around for somebody to introduce me to these bees, to see the bees, and I kept asking, where are the [00:03:00] bees? Where are the bees? Where are the bees? And, I struggled for two weeks, really, for somebody to show me the bees. They would show me a little tourist thing.

And as a beekeeper, I recognized that they weren’t showing me something authentic. So it really became very clear that in this land of Mayan bees, the Mayan bees have disappeared. And finally one of the women, a Maya ancestor, I mean a Maya elder, said, Come to my home. I have bees. I’ll show you the bees. And we walked into her home, back into the courtyard, and she had about 50 hives.

In her courtyard, COVID hit, and you weren’t able to return to act on this inspiration for [00:04:00] the Mayan Melipona Bee Sanctuary for a couple of years. It’s a bit of a long, magical story, how it all happened, but What then did happen was an opportunity came up to purchase about 50 hives from old beekeeper who was having health issues and decided it was time for him to give up the bees.

We met another Mayan man who lived right in town, who offered his land as a place to house the sanctuary. So we purchased this large number of beehives. Cesar May. Built the most gorgeous, beautiful structure to house the melipona bees. It’s called a meliponaria. So he built this beautiful meliponaria that will hold about [00:05:00] a hundred hives.

And that has become our bee sanctuary. Cesar. He is a melipona beekeeper, and so he is the guardian of the bees. He takes care of the meliponario, and as we bring new beekeepers in, he is the educator and teaches them how to take care of the bees. And every meliponario that we build, which are now out in the villages.

Because we are consciously creating a pollinator corridor and giving the bees a place to survive and to thrive. So many boxes actually are being checked. Our project We are absolutely an environmental project. We’re working to help increase [00:06:00] populations of this very crucial pollinator of the rainforest that is very much in danger.

We can address that in a bit. We’re also a cultural project. This relationship of the Maya people As I stated, With the Bee is about 3, 000 years old, but as those bees have disappeared, and they’ve disappeared, I would even say from the majority of the villages. As those bees disappeared, the cultural traditions around them have disappeared, the knowledge of how to take care of the bees.

Which, and it’s a rather, it’s much more intensive beekeeping than, for instance, with Apis mellifera. So those traditions were disappearing as well. And another really important part of it is the honey. That [00:07:00] this little tropical stingless bee, Xunan-Kab , melipona beecheii, makes. The honey is, if not the most, one of the most medicinally potent honeys on the planet.

The honey is the number one ingredient in the Mayan healing remedies. And the reason that the honey is so important is it’s got all the anti’s, anti bacterial, anti microbial, anti inflammatory. Let’s talk about the state of the bee right now. How is it doing, population wise? So, we have, a bit miraculously, assembled the dream team of all hive teams.

Dr. Stephen Buckman is a world renowned [00:08:00] entomologist. He is doing, right now, DNA studies on Honey from our meliponarios and pollen from our meliponarios. He has wrangled in Dr. David Rubick. And Dr. David Rubick is an entomologist who works at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. Dr.

Rubik is the world’s foremost expert on melipona bees. Dr. Rubik joined the Smithsonian Tropical Lab to explore the effects of Africanized bees. and the impact of Africanized bees. Well, one of the big impact of Africanized [00:09:00] bees, and that’s Apis, that’s Apis mellifera, is that they have taken over the wild nesting sites of this melipona beecheii bee.

So you don’t find the melipona bee out in the forest any longer because the Africanized honeybee is bigger, swarms more often, more aggressive, has a more hours of foraging in the day. So they’re literally out competing the native melipona bee. And that’s one of the big reasons that the populations of these bees have plummeted.

As is true of declining bee populations of all bees, there are many factors, pesticides and loss of forage. Dr. David Rubick [00:10:00] estimated about 20 years ago that really it, the bee was critically endangered. Now, through projects like our own, the population is ticking up a little bit, you know, the numbers are still frightening, you know, but a little bit better than they were before.

So if people wanted to get involved with the Bee Sanctuary, how can they help? We, of course, we always need funding. So, a lot of the project is being supported by the sale of the honey. On our website, please go to mayanmeliponabee. org and you can order honey on our website. If people would like to step up larger.

You could support a hive, supporting a hive is [00:11:00] 350 dollars. With some prior arrangements. It’s possible that you could visit our bees sanctuary in Valladolid, Mexico. I’m down there myself three or four times a year. And quite often that’s when people choose to visit because I can walk them through. Our local rotary club in Asheville last year gave us quite a nice grant that allowed us to build 3 more bees yards.

A bee yard cost about 4, 000 dollars US to build. So it’s also this is one of the reasons why the bees are disappearing in Mayan villages. They’re out of reach monetarily as well. One to buy one hive costs 350 US. So, and the Maya people don’t quite often don’t have that [00:12:00] kind of money. So, yeah. We need financial support.

One thing that I’m really, really proud about is that this past year, Pollinator Partnership, in conjunction with the Smithsonian, has awarded our project, the Mayan Melipona Bee Project, The Pollinator Advocate of the Year Award for the country of Mexico. So, we are getting recognized, I would say, on an international scale.

And they attention that we’re getting. Also, will bring the knowledge out, the information out, about the importance of this little tropical sacred Mayan bee, and [00:13:00] how important the bee is to the environment and to the Maya culture. Congratulations on that award, what an honor, and we will have all of those links in the episode on our website.

Thank you. So if you could encourage people to do just one thing to help support native bees, what would it be? To support native bees, of course. Planting native plants. There has been a co evolution of bees and plants over 65 million years. So, please plant natives. And there are lots of plant lists available to see which Plants are native to your particular area.

Thank you, Rebecca, for your dedication to the melipona bee and for sharing with us the important role they play [00:14:00] in both the environment and the culture of their native place. Check out the website, thebeesknees. website, to learn more about the Mayan Melipona Bee Sanctuary. And what’s our actionable advice from Rebecca?

Look for those native plants to feed your native bees. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, plant locally.