NEW YORK, NY.- As a child, Heriberto Vela, an Indigenous resident of Loreto, Peru, watched his father pull nests of wild stingless bees from trees in the Amazon forest. Together, the two then extracted honey from the nests to help cure colds and other ailments.

Stingless bees are native to the Amazon, unlike the more familiar but invasive honey bees from Africa and Europe that have spread through the Americas. The most obvious difference is that stingless bees don’t sting. Their honey, which is runny enough to be drunk like a liquid and is said to have a citrusy aftertaste, is used by many Indigenous Peruvians as a natural medicine.

Vela’s father didn’t know how to salvage the bees — they would fly away, or even die. “We would take the nests out and leave them lying on the ground in the forest,” Vela said. “Those bees were lost.”

Today, Vela’s methods are more sophisticated. His family keeps 76 nests of stingless bees in square wooden boxes perched on sticks and scattered around his home. Each artificial nest has multiple drawers, but Vela harvests honey from only one, which he calls the mielera, or honey pot, leaving the rest for the bees. “They need it to live,” he explained. “If I take it away from them, they may flee.”

The Amazon is home to hundreds of species of stingless bee, but as deforestation converts the tropical landscape into farms and ranches, these and other native pollinators are in danger of disappearing. Pesticides, climate change and competition with the honey bee, which is better adapted to agricultural areas than the stingless bee, introduces more strain.

Vela’s family is among the few who live off the income stingless bees provide. César Delgado, an entomologist at the Peruvian Amazon Research Institute who helped Vela refine his practice, wants to widen the appeal. “Beekeeping is a very good way for the forest and communities to adapt to climate change,” he said.

Building an economy around stingless bees, which pollinate much of the Amazon’s native flora, is a creative way to fight deforestation, said Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, a chemical biologist and founder of Amazon Research Internacional. But for the effort to work, Vásquez Espinoza stressed, it must incorporate the knowledge and ways of life of the Indigenous peoples who call the rainforest home. It must be “a process that is self-sustaining, and aligned with the culture of the communities,” she said.

The Amazon is one of the most biodiverse regions in the world. But widespread deforestation threatens the protection of Indigenous communities as well as the animals and plants that live there, and it reduces the habitat’s function as a major carbon sink amid Earth’s growing climate crisis.

“We are losing species that have never even been documented,” said Adrian Forsyth, an ecologist who founded the Andes Amazon Fund and is not involved in the beekeeping effort. “It’s not just that we’re burning the book of life,” Forsyth added. “It’s that we haven’t even read the first few pages.”

A sustainable conservation program requires funding, government backing and the integration of local knowledge and practices, he said. There also needs to be some incentive beyond basic conservation.

“People don’t value biodiversity for its own sake,” said Forsyth, adding that to get the message through, conservationists need to highlight how the goal relates to the general public. “Without pollination, you don’t get good crop yields. Without honey, you don’t have a good cup of tea.”

Vásquez Espinoza said stingless-bee honey grew in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic among Indigenous residents in Peru. It became a favored ingredient in alternative treatments for upper respiratory infections at a time when the country was hard hit by the virus. Selling the honey also provided income for families in remote areas who could not take advantage of government aid because they did not have bank accounts.

Delgado and Vásquez Espinoza hope to use these incentives to promote the practice of keeping stingless bees in artificial nests. They are also working with Indigenous communities to develop more sustainable methods of collecting honey.

Richar Antonio, a park ranger in the Ashaninka Communal Reserve who travels to spread the idea of stingless beekeeping, has found that people are eager to learn. “The only difficulty is the lack of materials,” he said. Limited resources for the practice reflect a broader concern: Current laws in Peru recognize only the honey bee as a species of national interest.

That means that stingless beekeepers and harvesters of wild honey lack many options for funding that could help them expand their business. Moreover, product assessments are based on the humidity and sugar levels of the golden goo made by stinging bees, so stingless-bee honey isn’t considered honey under the law — a barrier that prevents sellers from backing their products with food safety or quality labels.

“I know it is honey,” Delgado said. “There are people who come from other places and buy it because they know it is honey. But it’s just that, legally, it’s not.”

The lack of legal recognition also limits what protections are afforded to stingless bees and the growing market. Kety del Castillo, an Indigenous beekeeper trained through a project in San Martín, Peru, recently lost 10 artificial nests because of the use of pesticides near her home.

“Unfortunately, we have neighbors who are not interested in keeping bees,” said del Castillo, who moved the remaining nests closer to home after the loss. “But I’m starting over,” she said, adding that she and her husband had found a remote site in the forest where they hoped the pesticides would not reach the bees.

Delgado and Vásquez Espinoza are also working to expand what is known about stingless bees in academic literature. In September, the two published a study in the journal Food & Humanity on the chemical characteristics of honey from two species of stingless bees. The findings, while preliminary, suggest that the product contains anti-inflammatory, antimicrobial and other health-promoting properties. The scientists also reported traces of environmental pollutants in the honey, most likely a result of the bees pollinating within pesticide-doused lands.

The honey’s benefits might come from the resin of Amazonian trees that the bees are pollinating, said Claus Rasmussen, an entomologist at Aarhus University in Denmark who was not involved in the work. “Those resins are what different trees use for protection when they have a wound,” he said. While the trees are limited to only what they can produce, the bees have their pick of the forest — meaning a variety of beneficial properties can imbue their honey.

In addition, Delgado and Vásquez Espinoza are partnering with Antonio to map the locations and types of stingless bees found in the rainforest, data that will be compared with deforestation rates to predict how much the populations could decline in coming years. The scientists are also continuing to record what they call “ethnoknowledge” — the traditional knowledge of stingless bees honed over generations by Indigenous Amazonians. This includes which bees make the best honey for treating certain ailments.

For Delgado, this is one case in which academia is still catching up with Indigenous knowledge. “Science can get confused, but Indigenous people don’t,” he said.

They plan to publish the outcome of these efforts in academic journals and include Indigenous contributors as co-authors. “Perhaps they cannot speak in English or talk about the scientific method,” Vásquez Espinoza said. “But they are providing a lot of other information to access, to guide and to collect samples from.”

Last year, she and Delgado partnered with the Earth Law Center to petition Peru’s Congress for the national recognition of stingless bees. The proposal aims to legalize protection of the bees and promote awareness of the insects as an important part of the region’s ecosystem. Reforming the laws would also increase funding options for beekeepers to purchase supplies and transportation to local markets.

Whether the bill will become law is unclear, but already Vásquez Espinoza has seen local changes, she said. The price for stingless-bee honey has increased — once $3 for a half-liter, the same amount now goes for up to $20 — as more sellers recognize its value. Harvesters are also planting more dragon’s blood, a tree that many species of stingless bee nest in, and camu camu, a plant the pollinators feast on. (Both plants are native to the Amazon and are believed to confer health benefits.)

As stingless beekeeping spreads, entire families are taking a more active role. “We are all involved,” said Mechita Vásquez, an Indigenous beekeeper in San Martín. “Women, men, even children — they really like it.” She has noticed a particular enthusiasm for the practice among mothers, who usually stay at home to tend to their children. To Vásquez Espinoza, this reflects a bigger shift toward the empowerment of women in remote Indigenous communities.

And though many Peruvians remain unaware of the country’s native pollinators, at least one school is making sure the next generation will know. Betty Torres, an environmental engineer who teaches at a school in northeastern Peru called Nuestra Señora de Loreto, makes a point of integrating stingless bees into her math curriculum. Her students compute how fast and how far the bees can fly, and work out how much wood is needed to build an artificial nest.

Torres even takes her class home to see the nests she keeps — she owns 12 now — and to teach them about breeding. “My goal is for the kids to learn how to keep, so that they can then do it as a family,” she said. “With one nest, they can start.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.