Indigenous communities in South America are raising native bees to help protect the insects, conserve forests, and strengthen their own cultural ties to the ecosystem
_bioGraphic
Marcio Verá Mirim grew up listening to a family story. His grandfather, a leader of the semi-nomadic Guarani Mbyá Indigenous people, had dreamed that one day the sun would cease to rise and the sky would go black. The only light shining would be from a candle made of the wax of the jataí (Tetragonisca angustula), a tiny golden bee. Jataí are native to eastern South America’s Atlantic Forest—one of the most diverse biomes in the world—where Verá Mirim’s people have lived for centuries.
After this revelation his family started collecting the bees, which have bright green eyes and elongated abdomens, from hives within tree trunks. They raised the insects inside dry calabashes near their houses, ensuring easy access to honey for food and medicine, and access to wax for making ceremonial candles. When they traveled they carried the bees along to guarantee protection from the great darkness.
Verá Mirim is now chief of a tiny Guarani community called Yvy Porã on the outskirts of São Paulo, in southern Brazil. Over the past 10 years he has followed in his ancestors’ footsteps—but with a modern twist. Combining his family’s knowledge of bees with Western beekeeping techniques, he is raising jataí and nine other species of native bees in Yvy Porã. The village is one of six within the Jaraguá Indigenous Land, the smallest piece of federally-recognized Indigenous land in the country. It encompasses an area about the size of two soccer fields, flanked by the still-forested Jaraguá Mountain on one side and a busy highway on the other—an island of preservation squeezed by the growing metropolis.
On a sunny autumn day, I follow Verá Mirim through a forest clearing behind Yvy Porã’s communal fire pit, where people gather to socialize and cook. The traffic noise just outside the community’s barbed-wire gate is baffled by an orchestra of cicadas, the squeaky sounds of capuchin monkeys, and the gentle buzzing of bees. The insects fly in and out of dozens of rectangular wooden boxes mounted on poles. Within these three-story “bee hotels,” the insects live, build their nests, and store honey.
Very Mirim wears no beekeepers’ suit, only shorts, flip-flops, and a gray T-shirt with geometric Guarani patterns. He uses a small knife to open one of the boxes. Inside, furry golden-yellow bees with light-brown stripes crawl on top of a disk of wax, which Verá Mirim picks up barehanded. These bees are uruçu-amarela (Melipona mondory), native to Brazil’s portion of the Atlantic Forest and threatened with local extinction in several areas. Some of the insects tangle in my hair, and my skin tingles where one bites me. It is not painful. “All the native species are stingless, so we don’t need to be afraid,” Verá Mirim says, as a bee lands on his nose.
Sofia Moutinho 