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Sara Elisabeth Onsten

()coming Revolution An environmental study with local beekeepers in ,

Master’s thesis in Global Environmental History

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Abstract Onsten, S. 2019. (Bee)coming Revolution: an environmental study with local beekeepers in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Uppsala, Dep. of Archaeology and Ancient History.

In this thesis I study how the relationships between beekeepers and have evolved over time in the region of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil and how the beekeepers have experienced the environmental changes in this region over time. Bees and beekeeping practices generate important incomes for rural communities in Rio Grande do Sul, but also, they support agricultural systems through pollinating crops and increasing plants nutritional value. Inspired by historical ecology and multispecies narratives I explore how the human-bee relationships have been developed throughout history. Based on interviews and using the narrative tool of storytelling we meet the different beekeeper’s thoughts and perceptions when it comes to their relations and motivations in keeping bees. Furthermore, this thesis also explores the challenges and opportunities described by the interviewed beekeepers, by comparing past historical changes and present-day debates around the bees. Landscape changes, loss of biodiversity and overuse of pesticides in agricultural crops have affected the wellbeing of the bees. The obstacles and organisations of beekeeper’s are also considered. Beekeeping is discussed as a way to create ecological awareness and is promoted as a way to increase not just bee’s wellbeing living in Rio Grande do Sul, but also create better dialogues among different actors.

Keywords: Bees, Beekeeping, Biodiversity, Human-Bee Relations, Rio Grande do Sul, Environmental Changes, Ecological Awareness.

Master’s thesis in Global Environmental History (45 credits), supervisor: Anneli Ekblom, Defended and approved Spring Term 2019 © Sara Onsten Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, Box 626, 75126 Uppsala, Sweden

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For Ingvar & Gerd, Ary & Ilse Thank you.

4 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed and supported me in the process of writing my thesis. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Anneli Ekblom, who has truly guided me throughout this bee expedition. I also want to thank all the interviewees, who have shared their stories, challenges and valuable experiences in this study. In particular, I would like to thank both my mom and my cousin Raquel for being by my side during the interviews taking pictures, improving discussions and giving me all support. In this case, I would like to sincerely thank my parents, Tor and Miriam, who have always supported and inspired me to pursue my dreams and goals. Another person who has helped and encouraged me during this period, is my dear aunt Anna, thank you for everything. Without them I would not be where I am today. Of course I am also thankful to my family, beloved one, friends and classmates, who have been so kind and supportive throughout this entire process of writing my master thesis. Finally, I would like to say thanks to the main characters of this thesis, the bees. Thank you for keeping with the buzz around.

5 Contents

Acknowledgements ...... 5 List of Figures ...... 7 List of Abbreviations ...... 8 1. Introduction ...... 9 1.1 Why bees? ...... 10 1.2 Aims and Questions ...... 11 1.3 Locating the Research Area ...... 12 1.4 A Brief History of Bees Worldwide ...... 13 1.4.1 Honeybees (Apis Mellifera) ...... 15 1.4.2 Stingless bees (Melipona and Trigona) ...... 17 2. Conceptual Framework and Methodology ...... 19 2.1 Historical Ecology and Landscape Theory ...... 19 2.2 Humans and Relations ...... 20 2.2.1 Busy as a bee ...... 22 2.3 Research Design and Interviews ...... 23 3. Background ...... 25 3.1 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services ...... 25 3.2 Pollination and Agricultural Practices ...... 27 3.2.1 Pollinator Paradise Concept ...... 29 3.3 Conservation, Sustainability and Biocultural Values ...... 30 4. Brazil: the history of beekeeping ...... 33 4.1 Nature, Crops and Bees: an overview ...... 33 4.2 The historical background of the Brazilian Beekeeping ...... 34 4.3 Beekeeping at a regional level ...... 38 5. Bee-ing There ...... 42 5.1 Being with Stingless bees ...... 42 5.2 Being with Honeybees ...... 48 5.2.1 House ...... 51 6. Beekeepers Analysis ...... 55 6.1 To (bee) or not to (bee) ...... 55 6.1.1 Motivations and relations with bees ...... 55 6.1.2 Landscape changes and challenges ...... 57 6.2 Beyond the buzz ...... 60 7. Concluding Discussion ...... 63 7.1 (Bee) present and (Bee) positive ...... 63 7.2 The Bee Revolution ...... 65 References ...... 66

6 List of Figures

Figure 1. Political Map of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. 13 Figure 2. European honeybee (Apis mellifera). 16 Figure 3. Jataí species ( angustula). 18 Figure 4. The Abellina Farm in , Rio Grande do Sul. 36 Figure 5. Photo montage (from the newspaper Zero Hora). 40 Figure 6. Meliponaries in Bento Gonçalves. 43 Figure 7. Soft wax pots for and for honey. 44 Figure 8. Two different types of propolis. 45 Figure 9. Stingless bee hive and wild stingless bee nest. 47 Figure 10. The nest’s internal structure in a stingless bee hive. 48 Figure 11. Apiary in Rio Pardo, Rio Grande do Sul. 51 Figure 12. Equipment to extract and bottle honey. 53 Figure 13. Inside of a Honey House. 54

7 List of Abbreviations

AHB – Africanized BPBES – Brazilian Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services CBD – Convention on Biological Diversity CCD – Colony Collapse Disorder FAO – Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Ibama – Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources IBGE – Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics IPBES – Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services IPI – International Pollinator Initiative IUCN – International Union for Conservation of Nature Rebipp – Brazilian Network of Plant-Pollinator Interactions SDGs – Sustainable Development Goals SiBBr – Brazilian Biodiversity Information System UN – United Nations UNDP – United Nations Development Programme UNEP – United Nations Environment Programme WCED – The World Commission on Environment and Development WWF – World Wildlife Fund

8 1. Introduction

‘I always remember a phrase which I heard from a researcher during an International Beekeeping Conference in Santiago (Chile): “In the time that all world’s bees disappear, our planet Earth and humankind will also die off”. This is directly connected to bee’s pollination services, their responsibilities into provide us with essential nutrients and a diverse food diet, and in sustaining the biodiversity. I listened to these words 15 years ago. And since then, these words have remained with me throughout my life’.1 Bees are a natural resource, freely available in the wild. The quote above is from one of the beekeeper’s interviews which present in this study. Most importantly, the quote highlights in what ways the bees are responsible for the preservation of the ecological balance and the maintenance of the planet’s biodiversity. As Moore and Kosut (2013:85) have also observed: “Bees buzz through the world quickly, but in that time, they make a significant mark on our lives”. As this study explores, human-bee interactions have been changing over time and creating different levels of entanglements, whether through honey production, pollination or embeddedness into our human culture. Yet, when we reflect on the human-bee relations, beekeepers arise as the ones who have been truly involved with these tiny, but at the same time, powerful animals. In this thesis, I explore how the relationships between beekeepers and bees have evolved over time in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (Southern Brazil). As this study will show, there are many environmental changes affecting beekeepers and their relations with bees in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. Beekeeping is an important agrobusiness in the region and it generates important income for rural communities as well as supports the agricultural systems through bee’s pollination services. However, as this study also explains, the environmental conditions have changed significantly in the region over the last years due to landscape changes, loss of biodiversity and also loss of bees. As a result, these environmental changes have also influenced on the wellbeing of the bees and in the beekeeping industry. Here, past historical changes are compared with present day debates on beekeeping in the region and its challenges. I also want to explore, what motivates beekeepers in Rio Grande do Sul today, how do they explain their relationship with their bees, and their role in the landscape, how do they view the landscape changes? What are their challenges and how do they organize themselves politically to demand better conditions for their farms and their bees? As the environmental study of Entomology2 proposes, play a central role to different ecosystem functions, which involve nutrient recycling, plant propagation, as food for insectivorous, and by maintaining and plant community structure (Gullan

1 A quote from the interview with João, who is a beekeeper from the State of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). I interviewed João in January 2019 and I will describe more details about him in the next chapters. 2 Entomology is a branch of zoology (the study of animals) that studies insects and how insects interact with their environment and other species (Britannica 2019).

9 and Cranston 2014). Insects such as bees are considered keystones species3 because the loss of their ecological functions could lead to the collapse of the wider ecosystem. In 1987, the biologist Edward O. Wilson, reflected on what would happen in a world without bees and predicted that human life on planet Earth would not persist more than a few months in the absence of insects and their contributions to ecosystem services. By contrast, conservation biologist Thor Hanson (2018:2) has pointed out, that the current attitude of humanity toward insects, is best measured by the global spending on pesticides, which currently tops US$ 65 billion a year. As I will also explore in this thesis, the recent bee-mortality has been associated to environmental effects arising from the agricultural industry (e.g. use of pesticides and monocultures), from parasites and pathogens (e.g. varroa destructor) and from the overall loss of biodiversity (e.g. deforestation and animal extinction) (FAO 2018). Throughout history, it has been required for humans to work with other species but also to transform their environments in order to survive (Mosley 2010:2). However, these landscape changes have also originated many ecological challenges (e.g. climate change, loss of biodiversity, land-use changes, etc.), which our modern society now urgently needs to deal with (FAO 2018). The study of environmental history has emerged in order to focus on the interactions between human and the natural world as well as a re-centring of humans and their natural environments, to show how they are interlaced and constantly affecting each other over time in a co-dependency (Mosley 2010). The term Anthropocene was also introduced to capture the quantitative shift in the relationship amongst the humans and the global environment (Steffen et al. 2011), which it suggests that the Earth is now being modified by humans on a scale that is similar to a geological force. Hence, the recent overall decline of bees could be seen as a symbolic of the Anthropocene, in which humans are constantly influencing and altering Earth systems (Rockström et al. 2009).

1.1 Why bees? My interest regarding bees and beekeeping initiated before I decided to write a master thesis and choose this topic for my thesis. As Thor Hanson (2018: xvi) has described: “Bees today certainly need our help, but just more importantly, they need our curiosity”. I have always adored bees and have always used bee products (e.g. honey, beeswax and cosmetics). However, because I am allergic to bees since I was a kid, during most of my lifetime, I was concerned about getting too close to bees or finding myself in circumstances where bees could be flying around me. Throughout the process of writing this thesis and, also, once I have studied bees and learnt it so much about them after talking to the beekeepers, I am no longer afraid of bees. Informed by this sense of curiosity about bees, during my personal journey in writing this master thesis, I have also learnt many wonderful curiosities regarding bees and their features. For instance, that the honeybee is the only bee species that die after a sting and that one honeybee alone can produce 1/12 teaspoon of honey in its entire life. In the summer of 2018, I was visiting the Swedish side of my family in Tärnaby (Sweden) and I remember an article explaining about new regulations concerning specific

3 Keystone species are those species whose importance to an ecosystem’s structure, composition, and function is disproportionately large relative to their abundance. These species can be of any life form, but. they have in common an effect on their environment that is always greater than what can be expected based on their biomass (Berkshire Group 2012).

10 penalties to a person who is identified as responsible for killing a bee that it is classified as near extinction. I thought that this initiative was very relevant when considering all environmental issues related to the bee’s wellbeing. But, at the same time, I started to wonder about how the bees and the humans have been interacting over time and how our modern society truly need to reflect more on bees, as well as appreciate their major contributions when it comes to ensure the maintenance of natural ecosystems. After all, bees are everywhere, and they have always been part of people’s life. Based on these reflections, I started to search for more news and available data regarding bees and their current situation worldwide. I found lots of informative good literature both popular and academic, documentaries, and in-depth academic studies, which explained in more detail the important role of the bees when it comes to their major contributions for the natural environments. At the same time, the serious decline of bees worldwide and the associated environmental changes (e.g. biodiversity loss, pollination crisis, pesticides issues, and so on) worried me deeply. As a result, I decided to write my thesis about bees and beekeeping practices because I perceived this special buzz inside my head requesting for more knowledge when it comes to the bees and their relations, both nature and with the human beings. It is no coincidence that the word ‘Abelhuda’ it means someone that is very curious about things, and its originated from the Portuguese word ‘Abelha’ (e.g. bee in English). Also, somehow, I was driven by the idea that through studying bees and beekeeping practices, perhaps I could also locate opportunities within this field, to show the positive effects of beekeeping and the very deep relationship we share with the bees to promote biodiversity and create ecological awareness.

1.2 Aims and Questions After I had been somewhat ‘lured’ in to the study of bees from a general perspective, I decided to centre my studies about bees and beekeeping practices in the country of Brazil, which is also my home country. As I needed to limit this study geographically, I decided to focus on the State of Rio Grande do Sul and a few individual beekeepers. Even though I restricted myself to four beekeepers, I was glad to have the opportunity to interview beekeepers that are all different from each other, both when it comes to age and gender, but also in the practices of beekeeping (e.g. apiculture4 or meliponiculture5). Both apiculture and meliponiculture have been an important part of rural community’s life for many years in Rio Grande do Sul. In this context, I was also interested in studying how the beekeepers describe their relationships with their bees. With these beekeepers I have conversed on their motivations (personal or commercial) for keeping bees and in their perceptions about the importance of the bees for nature. But I have also asked questions about their perceptions of historical changes, the challenges and opportunities for the beekeeping sector in the region.

4 Apiculture is defined as the keeping of bees especially on a large scale, both words apiculture and beekeeping tend to be used as synonymous (Merriam-Webster 2019). 5 Meliponiculture is defined as the keeping of stingless bees on a commercial scale for honey production or pollination (FAO 2009).

11 Based on my research aims I have formulated research questions as follows: 1. What is the history of beekeeping in Brazil and how has the practice developed in the country over time? 2. How do local beekeepers from Rio Grande do Sul define and explain their relations with their bees? 3. What are the main benefits and challenges of beekeeping according to practitioners? 4. How can beekeeping create ecological awareness and be promoted for the benefit of agrobiodiversity? All research questions are interlinked and dependent on each other. Thus, by answering these four questions this thesis aims to present the reader with an analysis on how the relationships between beekeepers and bees have evolved over time in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. In many cases, the relationships between beekeepers and bees would be described as being ‘intimate’ or at least very unique. Beekeepers are connected to these animals in a way that few other farmers or agribusiness will ever be. In this case, at the time I was conducting the interviewees for this study, all the beekeepers have brought up how honoured they feel about being close to their bees. Furthermore, this study will discuss how beekeeping emerges as a means to advocate politically for biodiversity, by increasing dialogues among different actors (e.g. crop producers, local communities and governmental agencies) and by promote ecological awareness in the region of Rio Grande do Sul.

1.3 Locating the Research Area I selected my research area in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (see Fig. 1) for several main reasons. First, the State of Rio Grande do Sul produces the highest amounts of bee’s products in the nation of Brazil. According to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE 2017), Rio Grande do Sul is responsible for 48 percent of the total honey production in the southern region of Brazil, thus the State produces an average of 6,5 thousand tonnes of honey per year (idem). At the same time, Rio Grande do Sul is a large producer in agricultural products, and as will discuss further here, conventional agriculture (in particularly use of pesticides) and beekeeping is increasingly coming into conflict, due to the bee mortality in the region (as I will explain in Chapter 4). The State of Rio Grande do Sul, also has the longest experience of honey bee in Brazil as it was one of the first states to import European honeybees and later also ‘experiment’ with the Africanized honeybee. Lastly, I was born and raised in the city of , which is the capital in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Thus, I saw this study as a good opportunity for me, and as a master student in Global Environmental History, to explore how the interviewed beekeepers have experienced the environmental changes in this region in more detail.

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PONTO MAIS ©IBGE 2015 MERIDIONAL DO BRASIL -59° -58° -57° -56° -55° -54° -53° -52° -51° -50° -49° -48° Figure 1. Political Map of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (IBGE 2015). Regarding its geographical areas, Rio Grande do Sul is the southernmost State of Brazil and the ninth largest by area, with a total of 281,707 square kilometres (Meyer 2010). The State shares border with Argentina, Uruguay, the Brazilian State of and the azure waters of the Atlantic Ocean (idem). Rio Grande do Sul supports, The Pampas which are large open plain grasslands (occupying 63% of the territory), and the Atlantic forest (37%) which consist of dense evergreen forest vegetation. In addition, the region comprises a subtropical climate with four distinctive seasons and a vast array of fauna and flora. In this case, it is important to mention that the research area has both winter and fall seasons. The seasonal characteristics create direct impacts on the beekeeping sector in the region, through influencing the ‘honey flow’ season, which constitutes the periods with abundance of from flowers and trees that are blooming (usually in spring and summer). Besides, Rio Grande do Sul is recognised as one of the chief regions for agricultural practices (e.g. soybean, rice, tobacco, apples, grapes, etc.) and animal production (e.g. cattle, swine and poultry) in the country (IBGE 2017). In order to better guide the reader throughout this bee expedition, I would like to start my study by introducing a brief history of bees worldwide and their main features. I will also, as a background, explain about the main characteristics of the two species of bee types I am focusing in this thesis: The Honeybee and the Stingless bee.

1.4 A Brief History of Bees Worldwide The importance of the bees for the ecosystem lies in their pollination and in their role in ensuring fertilization of plants and, thereby, providing us with high-quality food. In fact, as I will explain in chapter 3, there are many commercial beekeepers who derive the majority of their income from renting their beehives for pollination rather than honey

13 production. At the same time, as I will explore in this study, there are many environmental changes reducing pollinators access to essential natural resources such as food and wild habitats. For instance, land use changes and unrestricted use of pesticides are critical threats to the bees and its pollination services. There are other examples of environmental changes affecting the bees such as the phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder6 (CCD) which has been a tragic breakdown in honeybee colonies health (Spivak et al. 2017). And problems regarding pests and predators such as the well-known parasitic mite Varroa destructor7, which was introduced from Asia to Europe in the late 1940s (FAO 2009). The diversity of values provided by bees also involves producing honey and other beekeeping products such as: propolis or beeswax, supporting biocultural values (Hill et al. 2019), and ultimately, in promoting ecological awareness (Potts et al. 2016). Honey8 has been an appreciated food for millennia (Crane 1999) and in fact, honey was the only sweetener for thousands of years, as the use of sugar cane was reported since approximately the 4th century B.C (Warner 1962). Furthermore, bees are recognized as the only animal species that produce food that is eaten by humans. In the last years, there have been also problems related to the honey fraud and adulteration through the illegal dilution of syrups into the pure honey (Apimondia 2019). Additionally, bee products have long been used in traditional medicine (e.g. Apitherapy) and in commercial trade worldwide. The history of human-bee interactions started since the Neolithic Age and, thus bees and humans have been crossing paths for at least 10 to 20 thousand years (Bogdanov 2014). The oldest record of human’s interaction with a honey bee dates back 8,000 years to a Mesolithic cliff in Spain, and it illustrates a human sketch robbing honey from a bee colony (Kritsky 2010). Stone Age artists had also captured the practice of searching for honey in cave paintings from Africa to Europe. Honeycombs theft were possibly the reason for our ancestors first intentional encounters with bees (Crane 1999). Although the identity of the first beekeeper is unknow, researchers recognize that the oldest historical evidence of beekeeping was carried out by the ancient Egyptians (Gillott 2005). The ancient Egyptian beekeepers used horizontal hives constructed from dried mud and straw. Besides, the Egyptians considered bees particularly valuable in their mythology. For instance, there is one Egyptian myth which described that when the Egyptian God of Sun ‘Re’ wept, his tears turned into bees (Kritsky 2010). There are over 20,000 bee species buzzing around every continent outside Antarctica. According to the taxonomic opus of Charles Michener (2000), there are seven bee families, in which some groups are known as being rare to find in nature while others can be easily seen in natural areas, or in farms, parks and backyards. Most bees are solitary (about 85 percent) (Batra 1984), which means that each female bee makes her own nest, lays a single egg and deliver food for the single larva that develops (FAO 2009). A few bee’s species show a high level of social organization and live together in a permanent colony, regulated by a single egg-laying queen. Although many bee’s species collect nectar that they convert to honey and store as a food source, it is only the colonies shaped by these social bee’s species that store significant quantities of honey (FAO 2009). This

6 Colony Collapse Disorder: Term describing when the majority of worker bees in a colony suddenly disappear and leave behind the queen bee, immature bees and plenty of food. The phenomenon has been affecting most of North America and parts of Europe since 2006 (Spivak et al. 2017). 7 Varroa destructors are external parasites that attack both honeybees and brood. The parasitic mite attaches to the body of the bee and weakens the bee by consuming fat body (Ramsey et al. 2019). 8 Honey is the natural sweet substance produced by bees from the nectar of plants or from secretions of living parts of plants or excretions of plant sucking insects on the living parts of plants, which the bees collect, transform by combining with specific substances of their own, deposit, dehydrate, store and leave in the honey comb to ripen and mature (Codex Alimentarius 1981).

14 thesis is going to focus on two particular species of bees that belonging to the ‘ family’. The Apidae is recognized as being the largest of all bee families, with over 5,700 categorized species (Thor Hanson 2018). The most popular ones are Bumblebees, Honeybees, Orchid Bees, Long-Horned Bees, Squash Bees, Carpenter Bees, Digger Bees, and Stingless Bess. The bees that will be focus on here are: The Honeybee (Apis mellifera) and The Stingless bee (Melipona and Trigona), both colony bees. In a bee colony there are two types of female bees, the workers bees and the queen bee, also there is the male mentioned to as the drone9. Queen bees are raised from the same eggs as workers bees. However, queen bees are provided with more food and with the royal jelly. Normally there is one queen been per colony and her main purpose is to lay eggs (e.g. around 2,500 to 3,000 eggs per day), thus the queen bee is essential for the colony survival (FAO 2009). Workers bees are responsible for all different activities regarding the management of the colony such as: collect pollen10 and nectar11, feed the queen, building and fixing the comb, producing honey, propolis and beeswax, and guarding the entrance of the hive. Moreover, workers bees can live from four to nine months during winter seasons, by contrast, in summer seasons the average life time of a ranges only six to eight weeks (Moore and Kosut 2013:85). Here I will explore the relationship between humans and bees through the practice of beekeeping in Rio Grande do Sul, from the perspective of the Honeybee and the Stingless bee. These two designated species of bees are regularly managed by local beekeepers throughout the practices of apiculture and meliponiculture. In this sense, I will start presenting a short narrative about each species of bee and their main characteristics. Besides that, I will explain through a brief description how these bees are relating to human beings and how they are affecting the nature surrounding by them. Yet, the rest of the 20,000 bee species are also plant pollinators and, therefore, they are playing a vital role for the maintenance of biodiversity and ecosystem services worldwide.

1.4.1 Honeybees (Apis Mellifera) Apis mellifera (see Fig. 2) is indigenous to Africa, Europe and the Middle East. However, this bee species has been imported to the Americas, Asian and much of the rest of the globe. There are many different races of this bee species, thus they have different sizes of individual bees and colonies (FAO 2009). Their characteristics are depending on in which part of the planet (tropical or temperate zones) the Apis mellifera lives. Kritsky (2010) points out that honeybee colonies are basically superorganisms. According to FAO (2009), there are normally 30,000 to 100,000 honeybees in one colony. Honeybee swarming behaviour has helped beekeepers to capture and transfer wild nests to more convenient locations throughout history. This characteristic has also allowed beekeepers to increase their number of beehives mostly during spring seasons (Kritsky 2010). Besides, honeybees communicate through the bee dance or ‘waggle dance’, which is a method to communicate the distance and location of food and water that is based on the position of the sun (FAO 2009). Honeybees can visit between 50 to 100 flowers in one trip, which can take between 30 minutes to four hours (idem). In addition, honeybees do not hibernate during the winter seasons, but they typically gather together into winter cluster and therefore warm themselves up. Honeybees transform the nectar to honey

9 Drone: Male and non-worker honeybee, its function is to impregnate the queen bee (FAO 2009). 10 Pollen includes high protein, carbohydrate, vitamins and lipids (pollinator.ca 2019). 11 Nectar attracts pollinators through its concentration of sugar, it can contain: amino acids, vitamins, minerals and lipids (pollinator.ca 2019).

15 through enzymes in their stomachs, thus they produce honey as a way of storing food for the colony during periods when there are no flowers, for instance during winter seasons or periods of drought. Honey is also an essential food for humans, which increase nutritional variety to people’s daily diet. Besides, honey can contain different characteristics such as its aroma, colour, flavour and consistency. These features depend upon the species of plants being visited by the honeybees (FAO 2009). Apis mellifera honey contains approximately 20 percent of water and, as a result, the honey generally tastes sweeter when it is compared to the honey produced by other bee species (idem).

Figure 2. European honeybee (Apis mellifera) on a the rare white-flowered devil’s-bit scabious (Succisa pratensis) (Wikipedia commons 2015).

16 Around the world, beekeeping has been practiced for nearly 5,000 years (Kritsky 2010). Over time, beekeepers have been modified and improved their beehives in order to better control swarms and increase yields. The most famous innovation when it comes to beehives is the standard design ‘Langstroth Hive’. In 1851, Lorenzo Lorain Langstroth (1810-1895), an American beekeeper, discovered the bee space12, which was a crucial discovery for improving modern beehives (Kritsky 2010). The bee space, with its moveable-frame, allowed beekeepers to manage their hives more easily. Therefore, the main benefit of this hive design is that beekeepers are able to harvest honey in large amounts without harming bees (Langstroth 1853). In addition, Kritsky (2010) explains about the importance of the ‘Bee calendars’ when it comes to the history of beekeeping. They compose a checklist of activities to be completed by specific dates over the year. Initially. in ancient times, bee calendars were based on folk philosophies such as zodiac- based systems and poetry portrayed beekeeping (Kritsky 2010). Hence, bee calendars also reveal how beekeeping has evolved into a complex science throughout history.

1.4.2 Stingless bees (Melipona and Trigona) Stingless bees (see Fig. 3) are closely related to others bee species such as: honeybees, bumblebees and orchid bees (FAO 2009). However, the main difference is that stingless bees have a non-functional sting, which it was reduced during the evolution of this bee species. Instead stingless bees developed new strategies of defence, for instance as gluing enemies with stick resins or biting invaders with their mandibles. Stingless bees developed before the break up of Gondwana land and the drifting of the continents, thus they have the longest evolution of all bee’s species and, they have been discovered in well-preserved condition inside pieces of amber, about 80 million years old (Michener and Grimaldi 1988; FAO 2009). Stingless bees are found in all tropical parts of the world, whereby they are connected to forest areas. In this case, Brazil is one of the countries where this bee species has been found. Likewise, different indigenous tribes have exploited stingless bee products since ancient times, including the Kayapo from Brazilian Amazon basin and the Maya from Mexico and Guatemala (Cortopassi et al. 2001).

12 The bee space consisted a 3/8-inches (9.5 mm) of space between the cover and the bars inside the hive, which ensures that honeybees would not glue them together (Langstroth 1853).

17

Figure 3. Jataí Stingless bee species () in Rio Grande do Sul (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). There are 500 different species of stingless bees already catalogued worldwide (FAO 2009) and, in Brazil, is estimated to have 300 species (Velthuis 1997; Witter et al. 2005). These bees usually create their nests in natural environments such as: hollow trees, soil cavities, or inside other social nests (FAO 2011). Thus, stingless bee nests are also quite different from the nests created by the honeybees. The number of stingless bees residing in one colony can range from some few hundred to more than 100,000 bees. Yet, stingless bees are very diverse considering their size ranges. They can start from species with the size of two millimetres to bees that are slightly bigger than the European honeybee (FAO 2009). Stingless bee and honeybee life cycles are also different when comparing their queen’s characteristics. For instance, in a stingless bee colony it is possible to find sometimes two or more queens laying eggs in the same nest. There are other interesting characteristics regarding stingless bees, such as that their honey has higher water content, that is around 30 percent, which results in special flavours and acidity when compared to traditional honey from Apis mellifera. Moreover, the honey produced by the stingless bee is well-known for its medical properties, which were first originated by indigenous tribes. These and other features will be explained in more detail in the following chapters.

18 2. Conceptual Framework and Methodology

In this chapter I will describe the conceptual framework for my study, and furthermore the methods which I have selected in order to build the study. The first two subsections in this chapter briefly define historical ecology and landscape theory, but also current thinking around humans and animal’s relations, or multispecies narratives, which is relevant when considering humans-bees interaction. Through this discussion, I lay out a framework to explore how beekeepers and bees have been interacting over time in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. When it comes to the methodology, this project combines historical and critical text analysis, fieldwork observation and semistructured interviews. The interviews and fieldworks will be based on an ethnographic study as I explain in more detail here. Moreover, I will attempt to present the results through a variant of storytelling13 when reflecting on the beekeeper’s narratives and perceptions around their relations with bees over time.

2.1 Historical Ecology and Landscape Theory Historical ecology research program is concerned with the historical interconnectedness of nature and human culture through time (Crumley 2003; Balèe 2006). Thus, it aims to understand how these consequences and interactions have assisted to the formation of contemporary and past cultures, but also landscape changes (Crumley 2003; Szabó 2014). According to Balèe (2006:75): “a central term used in historical ecology to situate human behaviour and agency in the environment is the landscape […]”. As a result, historical ecology takes a long view of history and landscapes, in which landscape is a place of interaction with a temporal dimension, where it is possible to find material expressions. At the same time, historical ecology also contemplates social and cultural evidence of the landscape transformations (Crumley 2003). As a field, historical ecology operates at the intersection of ecology, anthropology, geography and history, by combining their tools and techniques in order to assist people’s perception of what communities, ecosystems and landscapes lived in the past, but also how they have transformed over time (Szabó 2014; Beller et al. 2017). In this sense, historical ecology research is highly interdisciplinary. The increased concern regarding the future of landscapes can be explored in historical ecology, by considering changes in habitats type and distributions over time (spatial and temporal scale). As a result, historical ecology can help to provide new insights into complex system dynamics and changes in the Anthropocene (Beller et al. 2017). People tend to treat nature and society as separate entities, in this sense, when a researcher describes a landscape as ‘natural’ people often assume that the landscape is untouched or that the human-made world is mostly absent (Hinchliffe 2007:10), however, this notion is difficult to sustain in our modern world. The main object of analysis when it comes to

13 Storytelling: Art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination (Llamazares and Cabeza 2017).

19 using historical ecology as a conceptual framer in this thesis is connected to the landscape perception. As Ingold (1993:171) writes: “The landscape, in short, is not a totality that you or anyone else can look at, it is rather the world in which we stand in taking up a point of view on our surroundings”. The idea of ‘cultural’ landscape entails that the landscape is part of human activities and it contains different memories also related to individual experiences and perceptions about landscape changes (Strang 2008). Thus, by studying the interaction between humans (here the beekeepers) and landscape (the region of Rio Grande do Sul) one of the aims in this study focuses on changes in the cultural landscape. Doing so, I am also influenced in other directions focusing both on cultural landscape and also human-animal relationships.

2.2 Humans and Animals Relations Throughout history, archaeologists and anthropologists have been studied the critical reflection on how the human-animal relationship is played out and embedded over time, both in Western and non-Western ways (Boyd 2017). The lives of humans and nonhumans animals have been interlaced through different behaviours and levels of interaction. Zooarchaeology is defined as the specialized study of nonhumans animals and it was formally established in the middle of the twentieth century (idem). At that time, most of the scholars considered animals as a resource for economic exploitation, thus the perspective on human-animal relation was based on an ontological14 anthropocentrism. Anthropocentrism assumes that human dominance over other species is always ‘human- centred’ (Goralnik and Nelson 2012). Anthropocentrism was also defined by the environmental political theorist Tim Hayward (1997:50) as: “a set of attitudes which privilege human faculties, capacities and interests over those of nonhuman entities”. Yet, Tim Hayward (1997:50) also stresses out that anthropocentrism does not mean that humans cannot treat other species decently and with respect. The development of the academic research named as animal’s studies has emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, in which researchers from many different fields such as anthropology, history, feminism, biology and so on, focused on exploring the complex relations between humans and animals (Moore and Kosut 2013:31). Studies concerning humans-animal’s relations have been evolved and changed their approaches over time. From the early 1980s, scholars focused mostly on studying human and animal relations through reflecting upon hunter and hunted scenarios (Binford 1983). According to Boyd (2017), during this period, the traditional anthropocentric approach imposed over nonhuman animals was essentially maintained. From the early 1990s, researchers started to study ritual and symbolism interpretations of animals (Russel 2012), in order to better comprehend landscape changes in archaeology studies. Thus, through identifying deposition of animal’s body parts in events, such as prehistoric food practices (e.g. feastings), researchers aimed to comprehend about ancient cultural values (Boyd 2017). Once again, researchers had used humans-animal’s relations, but mostly concentrating their assumptions through an anthropocentric approach. However, since the mid- twentieth century the most dominant narrative about the relationships between humans and animals can be illustrated through the origins of domestication and its consequences for modernity (Boyd 2017). In this sense, the concept of animal domestication relies on the origins of agriculture and settled life, which started around 12,000 years ago in

14 Ontological: In ethics, having to do with how we understand the reality of the world, issues of what things are, how they act, and in what ways they impact other things (Goralnik and Nelson 2012).

20 different parts of the globe (idem). Moreover, the perception of humans-animals relations considers that animal domestication has occurred as a process of biological evolution over time (Marom and Bar-Oz 2013; Boyd 2017). Indeed, animal domestication is not observed as a singular event that happened in history. Nowadays, humans and animal’s relationships have been carried into a range of central topics within different fields of academic research, such as: biodiversity loss, species extinctions, climate change, and geopolitics of the Anthropocene (Boyd 2017). Van Dooren et al. (2016:2) explains that: “life cannot arise and be sustained in isolation”, and that happens because all types of relationships have created different histories and embedded memories over time. As a consequence, a new interdisciplinary multispecies approach has emerged to move beyond the anthropocentrism perspective. The feminist and biologist, Donna Haraway (2008) has also studied human connections with other species, and so she proposed the term ‘contact zones’ to describe the entanglements between different species when it comes to their co-presence interactions. Similar directions also come from geography and hybrid relations between human-nature (cf. Hinchliffe 2007:10). Multispecies studies take up a broader taxonomic scope of analysis in which focuses on the multitudes of lively agents by considering their entangled relations in a larger world. For instance, Van Dooren et al. (2016:2) points out: “The intimate relationship between a flower and its pollinating bee is one in which both forms of life are shaped and made possible through a shared heritage, […]”. In other words, the relationship between bees and flowers have emerged from coevolutionary histories, initially based on individual interests that wound up also as trading favours (in this case, food for the bee and transportation for the flower genes). Besides, the multispecies approach opens up spaces to study all different types of species (e.g. animals, plants and bacterium), in which scholars can explore new studies through immersing themselves in the lives of species. Yet, there is a critical opinion from other scholars (Ingold 2013; Boyd 2017), who have indicated that multispecies approach leaves a little space when it comes to address important topics related to human’s responsibilities and ethics, when it comes to for instance, the protection of nonhuman species. For instance, the The Botany of Desire (2002), written by the journalist and activist Michael Pollan, also suggests a different kind of approach in order to create a distinct sense around the relationship between humans and the natural world. In his book, Michael Pollan (2002) tells the reader different (hi)stories through the plant’s-eye of view of the world, based on four familiar plants (the apple, the tulip, cannabis and the potato). Thereby he proposes the reader to change his or her perspective, in order to consider the fact that as the plants became domesticated by humans, we were also put in a very close and intimate relationship with the plants. There are many other examples which can clearly illustrate how humans-nonhumans relationships have been evolved into several research strands and focuses, but also how such perspectives have contributed to our understanding of history and present. The point here is that humans have intimate relationships with other species, however, as Ingold (1994:1) has observed: “just as humans have a history of their relations with animals, so also animals have a history of their relations with humans”. Yet, in the end, only humans are able to build up narratives of these relationships and histories over time.

21 2.2.1 Busy as a bee Human beings have established intimacies and relationships with bees, in many ways, however humans have never really been able to pet bees, as ultimately bees are out of the direct control of humans (Moore and Kosut 2013:85). Even though we tend to classify animals under umbrella terms such as wild, dangerous, poisonous, domesticated, pets and so on, in fact, when it comes to bees, perhaps they are in between wild and domestic animals. In this sense, the bee emerges as an outstanding species which does not fit into predetermined human-animal classifications. As Moore and Kosut (2013:85) point out: “bees are not ordinary insects”, and the reasons may lie in the fact that bees are associated with some symbolic powers. One is exposed by the sting, which can sometimes conjure feelings of fear and anxiety to humans. At the same time, bees have been associated to symbols of aesthetic beauty and sweetness through being responsible for providing humans with honey. In this case, human’s aversion and desire towards bees can be contrasted between thinking of the stinger as a type of weapon against humans, but of honey as a precious nutrition in order to feed them. Bees are classified as invertebrates, meaning that these groups of animals do not have spinal columns (e.g. insects, mussels, spiders, snails, etc.), furthermore, invertebrates make up about 97 percent of the animal species on earth (Beekeeper Center 2018). There are over a million species of insects in the world, and as a consequence, insects dominate the animal kingdom when it comes to numbers and kinds (idem). At the same time, Moore and Kosut (2013:86) explain that, in general, human beings do not know how to deal with insects, so people’s first reaction is to swat or squish them. In any case, the point here is that most insects are not as popular as bees, thereby people usually tend to avoid other insects mostly because of their external appearance. However, the anthropologist Eben Kirksey (2013) has described around the recent movement named ‘insect love’, which refers to the passionate scholarly attention to insects and their connections to humans. Furthermore, Kirksey (2013) suggests based on this passionate interest that people need to learn how better embrace other species. Human-bee interaction has been associated to other subjects of academic analysis such as the one which focuses on the interspecies ethics (cf. Haraway 2008). For instance, many scholars have considered bees as an organism which suffers continuously due to human’s interventions in the natural environment. Yet, as already stressed in this study, bees are at the same time seen as an essential sign of well-functioning ecosystems. As a consequence, bees have been used as ecological symbols in order to promote environmental movements, green consumerism and other conservation campaigns worldwide. In addition, over time, the relationships between humans and bees have been developed within various cultural values and expressions. For example, bees have inspired literature, art, music, poetry and cinema, and they are also used for celebrated metaphors such as referring to someone as ‘being busy as a bee’ or calling the beloved ones as ‘honey’ (Moore and Kosut 2013:38). In many ways then, bees and humans are interlaced entities, and they have been transforming and recreating their relationships over time. Beekeepers are without a doubt the ones that have developed the most intimate relationships with bees, mostly when considering beekeeping as an embodied and emotional experience. In this case, beekeepers are aware that when they are interacting with bees, essentially, they are fully immersed within the space of the bee. As a result, beekeepers need to be closely present and attentive in body and mind when managing beehives and harvesting honey.

22 2.3 Research Design and Interviews In order to achieve my research aims and generate my thesis analysis (see chapter 1), here I will describe around my selected methods and research design. This study is based on ethnography, thereby ethnographic research is a qualitative methodology that lends itself to the study of the beliefs, social interactions, and behaviours of specific groups (Denzin and Lincoln 2011). In this study I will be focusing on four local beekeepers from Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil). Moreover, the collected data (e.g. qualitative interviews, observation, newspapers and pictures) will be used to answer my research questions (see subchapter 1.2). Qualitative interviewing has become a key method in the human and social sciences when it comes to a type of resource (Brinkmann 2014:276). Conversation is used as a central tool to scholars in order to obtain knowledge about society within specific topics of concerns. As Brinkmann (2014:277) writes: “People talk with others in order to learn about how they experience the world, how they think, act, feel and develop as individuals and in groups […]”. In this thesis, I decided to focus on semistructured interviews applying a face-to-face interview form rather than more impersonal surveys. I selected the semistructured interview method in order to create more opportunities for the interviewees to raise new perspectives and concerns and to formulate them in their own words. Also, I decided to design the interviews in the form of ‘one-on-one’ interviews which make it easier for the interviewer to create an atmosphere of trust (Brinkmann 2014:277). The four beekeepers were first contacted via telephone and email when I asked each of them about their interest and availability on participating in this study. After this initial phase, I organized an interview schedule by considering each beekeeper personal desire and disposal on sharing stories and points of views about the bees and the beekeeping practices in the region. The semistructured interviews were focused on topics related to my research questions. Thus, as a start I formulated a written list of questions and topics which I used as an interview guide. In this sense, I posed interview questions considering themes such as: the historical context of the beekeeping farm and its transformation; the relationship between bees and beekeepers over time; the daily routine practices and its current challenges; the cultural value of bees and its sustainable approach when it comes to beekeeping. But interviews were conducted in a way so that the beekeepers were guided to describe from their own perspective and opinions how beekeeping has developed during the years, but also to express their own thoughts on how the relationship between bees and humans has been transformed. The interviewees were also allowed to change the direction of the conversation and speak freely, though I then also came back to my predefined questions. The interviews were carried out during the months of January and February in 2019. This time of the year is summer in Brazil, thus throughout the meetings two local beekeepers had invited me also to visit their apiaries and meliponaries. I have carried out a total of eight in depth interviews with local beekeepers. In some cases, the beekeepers have retired already from the commercial practice of beekeeping, but they kept bees as a way of recreation and ecological support. During the interviews and the fieldworks, material was collected through the interviews and conversations, observation and photography. The interviews with the beekeepers were recorded, fully transcribed, and then carefully analysed by the author in relation to the research questions and thematic. After that, I selected which parts I should translate into English to present in this study for a deeply analysis. Moreover, I decided to adapt the concept of storytelling in order to originate a different set of tools for my discussion. Stories provide different material than other traditional

23 forms of data used in academic research. Llamazares and Cabeza (2017) explain that storytelling can lead to enhanced understanding on diverse values and perceptions around topics such as biocultural knowledge and diversity. Besides, storytelling can help to maintain a unique memory and connect conservation discourses to local contexts through two-way dialogues (idem). As a result, the beekeepers storytelling’s have the potential to bridging the gap between topics such as nature conservation, sustainability and biocultural approaches, when it comes to challenges linked to bees living in the region of Rio Grande do Sul.

24 3. Background

Inspired by the importance of preserving bees in order to sustain different Earth systems and humankind, here I will introduce the reader some of the main concepts related to bees and beekeeping. The chapter provides a background to my analysis and also aims to show the significance of the topic and, at the same time, the complexity of bees and beekeeping practices within our modern society. Bees are usually first associated as being responsible for producing honey, however beekeeping generates much more than just honey. Bees maintain biodiversity and ecosystem services through pollination of crops and food security. Besides, bees and beekeeping contribute directly to rural livelihoods in almost every country on earth. In this sense, there are important concepts linked to bees and beekeeping which have been important in helping me define my questions and which provide a broader context. Thus, the background for this project encompasses both the concepts biodiversity and ecosystem services; but also, more practically to pollination and agricultural practices. Finally, the research questions which I explore here also relates to conservation, sustainability and biocultural approaches. All of these concepts are connecting to bees and beekeeping to some level as I will explain bellow.

3.1 Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own. - Paul Hawken15 Biodiversity can be understood as a broad term that describes the variety of life on Earth, including the different plants, animals, micro-organisms, the genes they contain, and the ecosystem they form (Rawat and Agarwal 2015). The scientific networks of biodiversity include the fields such as: ecology, animal behaviour, comparative biology, systematics and population biology (Cracraft and Simpson 1995; Whatmore 2002:21). According to Dahiya (2006) human health and well-being are directly dependent on biodiversity which provides genetic resources for food and agriculture. In other words, biodiversity constitutes the biological basis for world food security and support for human’s livelihoods. Global biodiversity is changing very quickly, and some of the most important drivers of this change are climate change, pollution, land conversion (e.g. for conventional agriculture, plantations or forestry) and, ultimately, unsustainable harvesting of natural resources (idem). Over the past decades there have been other environmental issues leading to the decline and the extinction of several species. According to the IPBES16 Global Assessment Report (2019) around one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction. Additionally, the report (IPBES 2019) also highlights that, since 1990, the abundance of native species on land has decreased by at least 20 percent. However, when it comes to the insect species the global

15 From the book Bee Quest (Goulson 2017:103). 16 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

25 picture is less clear for the researchers and for now, the report has available evidence to estimate that at least 10 percent are threatened (idem). In order to control these declining numbers, information on the conservation status of species is delivered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and its Red List17 of threatened species, which is also a critical indicator of the health of the planet’s biodiversity (Dahiya 2006). In 2014, the IUCN launched the European Red List of Bees, which focused on the study of the conservation status of all European bee species (e.g. 1,965 species). The results of the assessment confirmed that 9.2 percent of wild bees are threatened, and 25.8 percent of bumblebee species are also threatened. However, according to the report (IUCN 2014) a total of 1,048 bee species could not be evaluated due to lack of data. The absence of scientific data and information regarding the bees and their current condition also illustrate the necessity of investing more resources in this field of research. The European Red List of Bees (IUCN 2014) suggests a number of policies recommendations for the European countries which include: increase the protection of habitats, build dedicated networks of bee experts, and develop alternative sustainable farming systems. One of the most important responses to the biodiversity crisis during the past 30 years has been the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) which was opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and was officially established on December 1993. The Convention focuses on three objectives: ‘The conservation of biodiversity; the sustainable use of the components of biodiversity; and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources’ (CBD 1992: Article 1). In this sense, the CBD is often seen as a key within the international context to promote networks of global environmental management. Rockström et al. (2009) also considers the rate of biodiversity loss as one of the nine planetary boundaries where loss of biodiversity has scaled beyond what can be reversed increasing the vulnerability of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, but also change in climate and ocean acidity. Thus, the accelerated biodiversity loss in the Anthropocene is especially serious as biodiversity sustains ecosystem functioning and services (Mace et al. 2005; Rockström et al. 2009). As Dahiya (2006:152) describes: “an ecosystem is an array of living things such as animals, plants and microbes, which is also combined with the physical and chemical environment where they interact”. The concept of ecosystem is also defined in the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD 1992) as: “A dynamic complex of plant, animal, and micro-organism communities and their non-living environment interacting as afunctional unit”. In order for the ecosystem, like wetlands, grasslands, forests and streams, to be able to maintain resilience to environmental disturbances, it is necessary to have a diversity of functional response mechanisms which is also supported by biodiversity. Furthermore, different species play different roles in ecosystems and, therefore, species loss affects both the ecosystem functioning and its potential to react and adapt to changes in the physical and biotic circumstances (Rockström et al. 2009). Consequently, healthy ecosystems are responsible for providing the circumstances and processes that sustain human life. In most of the cases, healthy ecosystems deliver life- sustaining services on a scale so large and complex that human beings would find it basically impossible to substitute for them (Dahiya 2006). Thus, it is significant to comprehend that disruptions of these natural services would result in catastrophic effects. In this sense, Dahiya (2006:153) gives the practical example of what would happen if bees and other animal pollinators crashed, explaining how this incident would originate

17 The IUCN was established in 1964 and its Red List is recognized as the world’s most comprehensive information source on the status of animal, plans and fungi species. The Red List categories are based on a set of quantitative criteria based on population trends, population structure and size, and geographic range (IUCN 2019).

26 in major crop failures. The conversion of natural ecosystems to urban, industrial and agricultural developments, represents the most intense transformations to ecosystems and their capacity to generate services (Schowalter 2013). At the same time, the prospected outcomes of these environmental conversions are difficult to predict in the long term.

3.2 Pollination and Agricultural Practices Of course you know that bees could not exist without flowers; but do you know that many flowers could not exist without bees? - Rev. Charles Fitzgerald Gambier Jenyns18 About one-third of global agricultural land depends on animal pollinators and close to 75 percent of the species of plants cultivated as food depend on and increase in quality with pollinators (FAO 2018a). Bees help to pollinate 90 percent of world’s 107 major crops (Zhang 2018:2) thus the diversity of food available is largely linked to animal pollinators and their services. Pollination is the transfer of pollen between the male anther and the female stigma parts of flowers in order to enable fertilization and reproduction (IPBES 2016). Pollination is an ecosystem service that is fundamental to the persistence of flowering plants. The reliance on animal pollination is called Zoophily which is when a plant relies on animals to transfer pollen (pollinator.ca 2019). Many plants are zoophilous and therefore, pollinators play an important role in sustaining global biodiversity and food security (FAO 2018a). Pollinators comprise a distinct group of animals dominated by insects, but also includes some species of birds, bats, primates, rodents and reptiles (idem). Bees and other pollinators have thrived for millions of years, certifying survival, food and nutrition for plants, animals and human beings. Bees are the most important group of pollinators linked to human well-being through the maintenance of ecosystem health, function and food security (Senapathi et al. 2015). Bees and flowering plants have developed complex interdependencies during millions of years. Bees have to obtain all their food from flowering plants through collecting pollen and nectar while plants depend on the bees to be fertilised (IPBES 2016). Yet, animal pollinators such as bees rarely rely on a single plant species for foraging and nesting resources and, they need to be able to interact with diverse natural habitats. Most tree species of tropical forests are insect-pollinated, and in most of the cases, they are bee-pollinated (Michener 2000). Therefore, conservation of many wild habitats depends upon preservation of bee colonies, otherwise the reproduction of major components of the flora may be impossible to occur. Since agriculture began around 12,000 years ago, approximately 7,000 plants species have been used for human consumption (Rawat and Agarwal 2015). Throughout history, agriculture has been increasing its dependence on pollinators. At the same time, agriculture is also one of the major drivers of the global decline of pollinators (Dicks et al. 2016). Land-use intensification and modern agriculture have resulted in monocultures and the use of large amounts of pesticides19, chemical fertilizers and other technologies

18 A Book About Bees (1888). 19 Pesticides refers to insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, disinfectants and any other substance or mixture of substances intended for preventing, destroying or controlling any pest, including vectors of human or animal disease, unwanted species of plants or animals causing harm during or otherwise interfering with the production, processing, storage, transport or marketing of food, agricultural commodities, wood and wood products or animal feedstuffs, or substances which may be administered to animals for the control of insects, arachnids or other pests in or on their bodies (FAO 2009).

27 to increase production. However, these types of monocultures end up reducing the agroecosystem and, consequently, decreasing pollinator foraging resources. Rockström et al. (2009) also describes land system change (e.g. agricultural expansion and intensification) as one of the factors which is influencing on the global environmental changes. The conversion of forests and other natural ecosystems to agricultural land has occurred at an average rate of 0.8 percent a year over the past 40 to 50 years (MEA 2005). The problem of land conversion is particularly severe in Amazonia were in 2008 it was estimated that about 17 percent (60 million hectares, an area the size of France) of forest had been lost (INPE 2008). Moreover, data from 2018, suggest numbers are far from improving as land conversion rates increased to be the highest in ten decades (BBC News 2018). As we will see in the coming chapters this land conversion affects the health of bees to a very high degree. The issues involving pollinators decline worldwide have been first recognized internationally by the CBD (in 2000) through the adoption of the International Pollinator Initiative (IPI) which undertook pollination services as a key driver in order to the maintenance of biodiversity and conservation of species at a global scale (Williams 2003). Nowadays, pollination by bees has become more respected and renowned because of their positive results associated to the superior quality of fruits, seeds, nuts and vegetables (here referring to their taste, size and nutrients). The first commercial introduction of beehives in an apple orchard took place in 1926 (Schowalter 2013) and the honeybee pollination improved the apple harvest by 40 percent. After this first experience, many crop producers started to rent honeybees to pollinate fruit and vegetable crops. The term ‘migratory beekeeping’ or ‘mobile beekeepers’ is used for describing beekeepers who move their beehives to places where honeybees are needed during the year seasons to improve the blooming progress. A well-known example of this practice is the annual mobile beekeeping that happens in California (USA) for the pollination of almond trees. About 75 percent of all bee colonies in North America are used for the almond pollination every year (Gillott 2005:728). This is the largest managed pollination event in the world and beehives can be rented for about $200 for the 4-6-week in the pollination period. Thus, the value of bees as pollinators could be up to 140 times their value as honey producers (idem). The economic value of pollination of honeybees has originated in the transport and introduction of these animals to most regions and countries (Schowalter 2013). However, the high density of colonies placed around the same areas can also increase the risk of parasites and diseases transmission among bee colonies such as the mite Varroa destructor (see subchapter 1.4). The beekeeping industry and researchers have been working on many different medicines to treat varroa populations however these mites are known as quickly develop resistance to chemicals used to control them (FAO 2009). For this reason, beekeepers need to invest in integrated methods of pest control and share information to the local associations. As mentioned before in this study, the diversity of food available today is largely owed to animal pollinators but, at the same time, several studies in a number of areas demonstrate that pollinators diversity (including bees) are exhibiting declining trends, mostly due to the intensive use of pesticides (FAO 2009). On the one hand, as Zhang (2018:1) explains, insects pests are responsible for originating an estimated of 14 percent of crop loss worldwide, thus pesticide use is necessary in agricultural systems. On the other, the overuse of pesticide has increased drastically over recent decades which has also been associated to biodiversity loss. The abundance of insect pollinators has declined over the past decades and use of pesticide is one of the major causes (FAO 2009). When it comes to bees specifically, different types of chemicals used in pesticides have been

28 indicated to alter bees foraging behaviours, communication system and larval development (idem). The use of pesticide reduces the bee immune systems, which also leads to deterioration of the colony and acceleration of parasitic infection. Sheridan et al. (2017) describes aa scientific study (led by the University of Neuchatel, Switzerland) in which researchers reported traces of neonicotinoids20 in almost 75 percent of honey samples collected from different producers worldwide. The study also stresses that the use of these pesticides have been identified as a key contributor to the decline in the number of bees worldwide. In this context, there are many ‘green’ movements demanding that crop producers and agricultural systems reduce their use of pesticides and start to diversify the agricultural landscape in order to preserve bees (FAO 2018b). As a consequence, new sustainable agriculture practices and political investments to increase cooperation between beekeepers and farmers have been established in many countries. There are other examples of strategies focusing on conservation of bees and biodiversity such as multifunctional landscape planning and organic farming (IPBES 2019). Moreover, there are some prospects to achieve new pollinator-friendly practices by designing new financial incentives or monitoring protected areas. For instance, the concept of pollinator paradise has emerged as an instrument in order to increase pollinators access to food and diverse habitats worldwide.

3.2.1 Pollinator Paradise Concept Katrina Klett21 (2019) elaborated on how she sees the loss of bees as a symptom of the current overall lack of diversity which is also with an increasingly fragile landscape perspective. Planet Earth is getting less and less diverse with the Anthropocene and, this is impacting directly on animal’s pollinators survival and their essential needs. As a consequence, pollinators cannot live in this new designed world due to the fact that their access to food is practically unavailable in some areas. There are some examples of harmful design areas for pollinators such as monocultures and vast monospecies area such as grass lawns. The key point here is that there is an overall necessity of re-designing our landscapes in order to create new and diverse friendly habitats to animal pollinators. Still, there is a challenge to designing and investing in measures that optimize both pollination services and enrich biodiversity conservation. There are many innovative projects that give examples of how to improve and design new landscapes in order to attract and increase spaces for pollinators particularly when it comes to bee species. In this case, Katrina Klett (2019) suggests some alternatives regarding what people can do in order to help conserve and promote friendly spaces for wild bees. For instance, she defines three simple initiatives: first, make a pollinator garden (e.g. clover mix attracts 48 species of bees), second grow bee-friendly plants (e.g. native flowers) and third get involved in habitat groups. In other words, the idea of designing pollinator paradises embraces the idea that every garden matter and no amount of habitat is too small. Environmentalist Emma Marris has also suggested in her book Rambunctious Garden (2011) a new way of seeing and experiencing nature, people usually think that nature is something ‘out there’ and, thereby, somewhere distant from everyday reality (e.g. pristine habitats). However, according to Emma Marris (2011),

20 Neonicotinoids are pesticides based on the chemical structure of nicotine and act through attacking the nervous systems of insect pests. They were introduced in the mid 1990s worldwide (Sheridan et al. 2017). 21 Katrina Klett is the CEO/Co-founder of Elevated Honey Co. a honey company operating in the mountains of Southwest China, to improve supply chain traceability and assure producers were treated fairly.

29 conservation and diversity of nature can also happen in places such as in parks, on farms, in people’s backyards, on roof houses, fast-food joints and so on. As a result, the notion of rambunctious gardens aims to generate more nature rather than just isolate the ‘nature left’ behind walls. As we will see in the coming chapters many of the beekeepers interviewed in this thesis keep bees primarily to maintain these rambunctious gardens.

3.3 Conservation, Sustainability and Biocultural Values We have to realize that each day we make some kind of impact. And we have a choice as to what type of impact we will make. - Jane Goodall22 Conservations traditions have existed since ancient times in the history of both Western and non-Western cultures (Curt 2013). Ancient civilizations had put efforts into protect particular animals, plants species, special lands and to sustain productivity of agroecosystems. For instance, the European traditions of forestry and royal game preserves, date back to the Middle Ages and beyond (idem). In these cases, ancient cultures had developed customs and laws in order to regulate hunting practices, but also to explain how people should use forests resources. According to Curt (2013), during the 1800s and the 1900s, the conservation movement emerged in response to accelerated changes in demographic and environmental conditions, which was associated to the expansion of market economies and technologies. Over the decades, the conservation movement has been developing itself in response to different environmental issues such as widespread deforestation, industrial pollution, watershed degradation, animal extinction and so on. In 1980, the IUCN published the World Conservation Strategy (in partnership with UNEP23 and WWF24) in order to encourage the conservation of the natural resources. Moreover, the strategy was a guidance on how the conservation framework should be carried out amongst different groups of users (e.g. policymakers, conservationists and civil society), where conservation was defined as: ‘The protection, care, management, and maintenance of ecosystems, habitats, wildlife species and populations, within or outside of their natural environments, in order to safeguard the natural conditions for their long-term permanence’ (IUCN 1980). Dahiya (2006) explains that from that moment on, the main focus of conservation action has shifted from protecting individual species to conserving natural habitats and ecosystems. After this event, the WCED25 published the report Our Common Future in 1987 (also called the Brundtland report), with the ultimate purpose of introducing the concept of Sustainable Development worldwide, which was defined as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (1987:43). In this case, the concept has emerged as an integral part of national and international policies by integrating economic, environmental and social concerns. In order to better address international policies focused on sustainability, the UN announced the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2012, which

22 Jane Goodall is an English primatologist and anthropologist; she is considered to be the world’s foremost expert on Chimpanzees. 23 The United Nations Environment Programme. 24 The World Wildlife Fund. 25 The World Commission on Environment and Development.

30 constitutes of a total of 17 universal goals. When it comes to the role of bees for the SDGs, there are many goals which can be directly associated to the bees in terms of considering their environmental contributions. For instance, by acting as pollinators bees are promoting biodiversity (Goal 15) and fighting against hunger (Goal 2). Moreover, beekeeping provides decent jobs (Goal 8) in agriculture and other sectors and reduces poverty worldwide (Goal 1) (UNDP26 2018). For these reasons, in 2015, the Deputy Prime Minister of the Republic Slovenia Dejan Zidan, proposed the celebration of World Bee Day, as a way to remind the global society about the importance of bees for the maintenance of the world’s biodiversity and humankind. In this sense, the UN General Assembly adopted in 2017 by consensus a resolution declaring that on 20th May of every year is World Bee Day. In the official occasion, Dejan Zidan (2017) has clarified: ‘After three years of efforts both in terms of the official procedures at the UN and with regard to the intensive process of informing countries around the world, we have succeeded with this initiative. Bees and other pollinators finally have the place they deserve in view of their importance for the world and for humanity. The proclamation of World Bee Day proves that the will to take action does exist. I am happy that realization of the importance of bees for sustainable development and the future of humanity in general has reflected in the consensual support to the resolution’. As Dejan Zidan (2017) explains further, the chosen date of 20th May was based on two reasons, first the month of May reflects the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere. Second, the date of 20th May was the birthday of Anton Jansa (1734-1773), who was known as being the Slovenian pioneered of modern beekeeping, but also recognized as the first instructor of modern beekeeping in modern history. By contrast, as Winfree (2010) has explained, when it comes to strategies for conservation, insects are still underrepresented in animal species protection programs. In this case, bees are sharing the same fate of other insects in being poorly known and poorly protected worldwide (idem). In order to better communicate the bee’s environmental issues worldwide, the WWF has categorized bees under both the definitions of keystone (through pollination) and indicator species (through disappearance and death) (Moore and Kosut 2013:82). The concept of biocultural diversity has also emerged in order to reflect on how people- nature interlinkages have developed over time in specific ecosystems, by considering cultural, spiritual and environmental values (Hill et al. 2019). The term has also originated different biocultural approaches to promote conservation and sustainability throughout recognizing that local cultural perspectives (e.g. Indigenous peoples and local communities) are key actors in terms of increasing living being’s inclusivity. Hill et al. (2019) explains that pollinators, such as bees, make vital contributions to local communities not just in economic terms, but as part of socio-cultural heritage, social relations and identity (e.g. rituals, dances and myths). There are many rural communities worldwide which rely on beekeeping practices that underpin the good quality in their lives, as well as increase their knowledge of local biodiversity. For instance, beekeeper’s knowledge in animal behaviours; their spiritual relations with bees and; ultimately, their taboos and traditions to protect pollinators habitat, are good examples of biocultural approaches (Hill et al. 2019). Here the point is that there are many successful biocultural approaches to pollinator conservation linked to local communities’ ecological knowledge and positive interactions with nature.

26 United Nations Development Programme.

31 As Moore and Kosut (2013:48) points out: “In their disappearing, bees have become more visible to us”. As this chapter discusses, in recent years, there has been a considerable increase in environmental movements towards conservation of bees and their interactions with other ecosystems. Debates on sustainability, and definitions of sustainability has also resulted in policy changes, all being disseminated in order to encourage a more ethical relationship between humans and bees worldwide. Ultimately, here it is possible to see how bees have been positioned in the intersections between the environmental issues (e.g. animal extinction and biodiversity loss) and the politics of food productions (e.g. pollination of crops and food security). The political status of the bees is also clearly reflected in the motivations and understanding of bees among the beekeepers in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil as we shall see.

32 4. Brazil: the history of beekeeping

To better tell the narratives and perceptions of the beekeepers from Rio Grande do Sul in this study, I will first present the reader with some historical aspects considering bees and beekeeping in Brazil. Thus, in this chapter I aim to investigate how the history of beekeeping has developed in Brazil. I will start this chapter by presenting some relevant information regarding Brazil and its general records when it comes to nature, crops and bees. In the second part, I will present a chronological background of the history of beekeeping in Brazil, by reviewing the most important literature and their main thoughts. In the last subchapter, I will explore two articles published by a local newspaper (from Rio Grande do Sul) which I have collected during my period of interviewing beekeepers in Brazil, between January and February 2019.

4.1 Nature, Crops and Bees: an overview Brazil is known as being at the top among 18 so called megadiverse countries around the globe, and it hosts between 15 to 20 percent of the world’s total biodiversity. According to the Brazilian Biodiversity Information System (SiBBr 2018), the Brazilian fauna constitutes around 116,000 species of animals, in which more than 83,000 are insects. Meanwhile the Brazilian flora have more than 47,000 species of fungi and plants. Therefore, the country is critically important when it comes to monitoring biodiversity loss and to invest in conservation efforts. Brazil has a total of six distinctive biomes27 which has originated in a rich diversity and different types of ecosystems across the country (SiBBr 2018). The vast and rich flora existing in the country attracts a great number of animal pollinators and bees are one of them. Brazil have approximately 3,000 different bee species (Bee Care 2019) all exhibiting different colours, sizes, shapes and ecologies. The country has favourable environments for bees and has an abundant variety of vegetation from which bees can collect resins, nectar and pollen (Araújo et al. 2018). These features produce a vast range of quality, characteristics and chemical diversity among the bee products, all variable when collected in different seasons and in different regions around the country (idem). Sadly, some Brazilian biomes have undergone extensive clearing in the past decades, especially for agricultural purposes (dos Santos et al. 2018). In fact, the excessive use of pesticides on agricultural crops in Brazil seems to be one of the most critical obstacles preventing partnership between farmers and beekeepers over the last years. In 2019, the first thematic report on Pollination, Pollinators and Food Production in Brazil (BPBES28 and Rebipp29 2019) describes that the country has a total of 191 different

27 Biomes are defined as: a set of life forms (vegetal and animal) consisting in contiguous types of vegetation that can be identified at a regional scale with a similar geo-climatic condition and a shared history of changes, resulting in a particular biological diversity (Global Forest Watch 2019). 28 The Brazilian Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. 29 The Brazilian Network of Plant-Pollinator Interactions.

33 types of agricultural crops linked to food production, and 114 of them (60 percent) are depending on pollination services. Furthermore, in an average Brazilian farm, it has been estimated that there are over 600 animal species that visits the farm, and at least 250 of them have pollination potential. Still, bees represent a total of 66 percent of the pollinators in Brazilian agriculture. In addition, the economic contribution of pollinating animals in Brazilian agriculture were estimated at US$ 11.62 billion in 2018 (idem). The economic calculation that was the basis for this estimate comprised the production of 67 items, which soybean account for 60 percent of the estimated value, followed by coffee (12 percent) and then oranges (5 percent) (idem). Hence, animal pollination is responsible to ensure food security and income for farmers in Brazil. Over time, problems including deforestation and agrochemicals have emerged as critical threats against pollinators wellbeing around the country (as I will discuss in the next sections). The newest report (BPBES and Rebipp 2019) also presents a summary for Brazilian policymakers on how to integrate actions in several areas (e.g. agrobusiness, Brazilian government, academic researchers, etc.) to mitigate the risks and protect pollinators. Ultimately, the report (idem) suggests different conservation polices focused on pollinators wellbeing such as: ecological intensification of the agricultural landscape, organic farming and the avoidance of pesticide use and the development of alternative forms of integrating pest control across the country. However, as the report was launched in 2019, for this reason there are no available data considering which initiatives have already been set up in order to improve the environments for animal pollinators.

4.2 The historical background of the Brazilian Beekeeping

The relationship between humans and bees in Brazil first developed throughout the long- lasting tradition of honey hunting of native bee colonies (also called stingless bee). This practise was considered an important part of the livelihoods of forest dependent Indians in the country since many ages (Jaffe et al. 2015). In Brazil, the history of beekeeping (apiculture) started around 1839 when the priest Antonio Pinto Carneiro was allowed by the king to import European honeybees (Apis mellifera) from the countries of Portugal and Spain (Rolim et al. 2018). In 1845, immigrants from Germany also introduced honeybees in southern Brazil. The first honeybees were introduced in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, the same region which I have focused on in my research. In the 19th century, the beekeeping production was minor, thus beekeepers could manage bees without any special instruments or clothes (Camargo et al. 2012). One of the pioneers in Brazilian apiculture was Augusto Frederico Hannemann, who arrived in 1853 and lived in the county of Rio Pardo (located in Rio Grande do Sul) (Pegoraro et al. 2017). Hannemann built the first centrifuge to extract honey in Brazil and Latin America. Hannemann was also responsible for managing a great number of bee colonies and for writing bulletins about the Brazilian apiculture into international journals from Germany and Austria (Pegoraro et al. 2017). The bee farm where Hannemann lived and where he had also built the first centrifuge was visited during one of the interviews for this study. The old bee farm, initially owned by the Hannemann family, is located near to one of the interviewed bee farmers. Therefore, it was possible for me to organize a quick visit in the old property on my way from one of the interviews. The name of the farm is the ‘Abellina farm’, and Abellina is a name originating from the Portuguese word ‘Abelha’, that means bee. The farm is located near to the city of Rio Pardo (around 15 minutes by car) and it is possible to see its gates from

34 the municipal road. In this case, I was able to walk around the farm that now consist of the main house, and it is still possible to see the farm name and the first year of operation painted on the wall (see Fig. 4). Nowadays, despite its legacy, the farm is not being used to keep honeybees or to produce any type of bee product. In fact, the farm is almost abandoned, and no one has been living there for a while. Beekeepers from the region of Rio Pardo have suggested to the Brazilian government purchase the property (currently the farm has a private owner) and use the old bee farm as a place to hold national conferences for the beekeeping industry, but also as a place to organize training lectures about how to keep, protect and interact with bees. For the moment there is no evidence of such formal proposals concerning the future of the Abellina farm. Despite the initiatives of Hannemann, the commercial production of honey started in Brazil only in 1939. However, it was only after the 1960s when honey production became more significant in economic terms. In the 1950, honey production was around 8 thousand tonnes per year in Brazil, and the country was placed as the 27th largest producer worldwide. Sadly, during the same year of 1950, Brazilian apiculture faced serious problems related to pests and diseases which during that year had reduced more than 80 percent of the honey production in the country (Rolim et al. 2018). Consequently, in 1956, the professor Warwick Estevan Kerr was requested by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture to travel to Africa and look for a selection of African honeybees (Apis mellifera scutella). This particular honeybee species was recognized as being more productive and resistant against pests or diseases, however the species was also known as being more aggressive when compared to the European honeybees. The first idea of the Brazilian researchers was to study the African honeybee in labs to understand more about its characteristics. However, due to some management errors, a cross-breeding of African honeybees and European honeybees occurred, thus originating the poly-hybrid ‘Africanized honeybee’ (Apis mellifera L.) (Rolim et al. 2018), which them spread all over the country.

35

Figure 4. Picture of the Abellina Farm in Rio Pardo (Rio Grande do Sul) (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). At that time, there were no available data about the biology of the African honeybee, so the beekeepers didn’t know how to handle these hybrid bees (Gonçalves 2001). The aggressiveness of the hybrid bees produced many social problems and the situation created an overall decline in beekeeping activities during the following years. This event also created the myth of the ‘killer bee’ in Brazil (Gonçalves 2001), because of the particular characteristic of the African honeybee being when compared to the European honeybee. Thus, the 1950s, was a period in beekeeping history referred to as the ‘chaos of Brazilian beekeeping’. Over time, Brazilian researchers started to study these new bee’s in order to improve beekeeper’s management, equipment and apiaries. Ferreira and Jong (2001) explain that Brazilian researchers introduced European virgin queens to cross with the Africanized drones, thus reducing bee aggressiveness. In the end, these new selected ‘Africanized queens’ resulted in a huge increase in production. Besides, in 1970, there was the first Brazilian Beekeeping Congress in the city of Florianopolis and in the same year the foundation of the Brazilian Beekeeping Confederation was created. Hence, the industry of beekeeping was discussed for the first time in a well-structured and planned context. Researchers decided to introduce the terminology ‘Africanized Honey Bee’ (AHB) to the poly-hybrid honeybee in order to replace the inappropriate denominations such as: African bees or killer bees (Gonçalves 1974). All the improvements regarding the methods of how to handle the AHB has assisted to the process of adaptation between beekeepers and the AHB in Brazil (Gonçalves 2001). Likewise, these events originated in great commercial improvements for the national beekeeping sector, because this poly-hybrid bee was revealed to be in many ways better adapted to tropical conditions, therefore improving honey production overall in the long term.

36 In 1980, beekeeping was finally considered as an agribusiness in Brazil and the country were exporting bee products to various regions of the world. Africanized honeybees are very resistant to bee diseases, and in most of the case, these bees do not need any type of treatment or medicine in their colonies. Pests or mite parasites such as the varroa (see subchapter 1.4) also exist in Brazil, however, Ferreira and Jong (2001) explain that the levels of infestation are lower in the Africanized honeybees, which combines better mechanisms of resistance through reducing the rate of reproduction of the mites which enter worker brood cells. Additionally, Africanized honeybees have developed higher hygienic behaviour when compared to other species of bees (e.g. European honeybee), thus they are used to remove unusual broods or mites quickly from their bodies (Ferreira and Jong 2001). These features helped to increase the international demand of Brazilian bee products, mostly based on the fact that the country has uncontaminated honeybee colonies with organic honey. Unfortunately, in the 1990s, the Brazilian beekeeping sector faced severe drops in honey production due to deforestation for agriculture. For instance, studies carried out in the region São Simão (São Paulo) by Ferreira and Jong (2001) describe the reduction of the native forest cover in the region where beekeepers kept beehives. From 1960 to 1969, the area covered by native forest was around 32 percent in the region, however, from 1990 to 1997, the area of native forest was around 6 percent (Ferreira and Jong 2001). As a result of deforestation, bees living in the region of São Simão became entirely dependent on cultivated crops such as eucalyptus and orange trees. Today apiculture in all territory of Brazil is only based in the poly-hybrid Africanized honeybee (Apis mellifera L.). Since 1956, the Brazilian beekeeping industry has improved significantly in terms of organization and there is also a higher degree of mechanization (Gonçalves 2001). However, there are still several issues regarding the necessity of new investments in technology, training programs, and national policies to protect bees. Currently, Brazil is among the ten biggest producers in the world when it comes to honey production (FAO 2018) and the second largest producer of honey in Latin America, after Argentina (Araújo et al. 2018) According to IBGE (2017), Brazilian honey production amounts to 40 thousand tonnes a year, with high quality and emphasis in organic honey. In 2017, Brazilian statistics (IBGE) have estimated over 500 thousand beekeepers around the country, and over 2 million colonies of bees, including both apiculture and meliponiculture. Yet, national organizations and Brazilian Government are still lacking data and need to improve the resources regarding the availability of the data and the quality of recent statistics about the beekeeping sector and its results all over the country. Meanwhile, over the last 50 years, meliponiculture have also increased in Brazil. Stingless bees are easier to management and also requires less overall investments for commercial sale (Venturieri et al. 2012). At the same time, because of the diversity of species among the stingless bee’s species the country, there are many different types of techniques in order to harvest honey and produce other stingless bee products such as pollen and propolis. In this case, there are some difficulties concerning how federal laws should proceed in order to establish an efficient control when it comes to sell stingless bee products in both the national and international market. Brazilian researchers Nogueira-Neto (1970; 1997) and Kerr (1996) have recorded the history of meliponiculture in Brazil and its main changes over time. In general, the practice of keeping stingless bees have focused mostly on the production of honey over the history. However, during the last decade, local communities have started to keep stingless bees with the purpose of supporting nature conservation and for its cultural values, as it is associated with Indian cultures (Venturieri et al. 2012.). As a consequence,

37 meliponiculture has been seen as a new popular way to promote ecological education and environmental justice around the country. Stingless beekeepers have also invested in alternative beekeeping practices, for instance, they are now multiplying stingless bee colonies in order to sell the new colonies in the beekeeping marketplace. Jaffe et al. (2015) explains that colony multiplication is considered the most sustainable method to obtain new stingless bee colonies based on the reason that the beekeeper does not need to remove wild bees from their native habitat. Furthermore, studies considering the use of stingless bees in agricultural plantations have also been carried out in order to examine the potential impact of stingless bees on increasing crop yields, through their pollination services. As a result, Brazilian researchers (Heard 1999; Slaa et al. 2006; Venturieri et al. 2012) explain that stingless bees can contribute positively for pollination when it comes to both the agricultural sector and wild habitats (e.g. Brazilian forests). For instance, the pollination of stingless bees can improve tropical plants nutritional value, moreover, they are better adapted to the country weather conditions (in this case the tropical weather) when compared to the honeybees. Additionally, it is also possible to keep stingless bees in closed environments such as greenhouses. The are some environmental issues which have been associated as responsible for affecting the wellbeing of the stingless bee in Brazil. Venturieri et al. (2012) explain that deforestation and loss of wild habitat are the main issues when it comes to the environmental changes disturbing stingless bee wellbeing. As already explained in this study (see subchapter 1.4.2) generally, these native bees build their nests inside hallow trees. As a result, landscape changes can be directly pinpointed as a major issue when it comes to the challenges affecting the conservation of the stingless bee.

4.3 Beekeeping at a regional level The bee-fauna of Rio Grande do Sul contains around 400 species of bees (Moure’s Bee Catalogue 2012), distributed in 76 genera of six families (Wittmann and Hoffman 1990). The Apidae family (Honeybee and Stingless bee family) constitutes 26 species of 14 genera around the State (idem). In this sense, the State has a very diverse bee-fauna which contributes to the biodiversity of the region. According to the Beekeeping Sectorial Chamber official data, in Rio Grande do Sul, there are around 34,000 beekeepers around the State, with a total of 493,000 beehives (Daroit 2019). However, over the last years, beekeepers have reported many issues concerning bee mortality around the State. The reasons behind these tragic losses still are being studied by Brazilian researchers. Scientists have been collecting samples of dead bees all around the State in order to analyse if they exhibit any abnormal chemicals in their organisms. Scientific results confirm that many bees have agrochemicals such as neonicotinoids and Fipronil30 in their bodies (Grigori 2019). The presence of agrochemicals in bees and the bee mortality, as I have discussed in the introduction, became somewhat of a symbol of biodiversity loss. This has given rise to local debates in the beekeeping sector in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. Here I will give two examples of articles from a local newspaper (also from Rio Grande do Sul) published at the same time that I was conducting the interviews with the beekeepers. The newspaper articles provide a background to the field study as they give an understanding of the societal context of bees and beekeeper’s in Rio Grande do Sul and I will therefore review them here in more detail.

30 Fipronil is a broad use insecticide that belongs to the phenylpyrazole chemical family. It is used to control , beetles, cockroaches, fleas, ticks, , and other insects (NPIC 2009).

38 The newspaper which I will use here to exemplify the debate on bee mortality in Rio Grande do Sul is named Zero Hora, and it is edited in the city of Porto Alegre (located in Rio Grande do Sul). Zero Hora is the newspaper with largest circulation in the State, and it has the fifth largest distribution in print and digital newspapers in Brazil (Media Ownership Monitor 2019). The newspaper contents are mainly about topics related to the south region of Brazil. However, Zero Hora also includes national and international publications within 17 different segments. The popularity of Zero Hora in Rio Grande do Sul relies on its value as a newspaper focusing on local culture and gaucho31 traditions, and the newspaper has on overall approval around the region by its readers. In this case, Zero Hora focuses on reviewing contemporary issues which are also related to cultural and social contexts in the State. An article in the newspaper Zero Hora (published on November 26th, 2018) written by Loeblein, G. comments on the current issues linked to bee mortality and incorrect use of pesticides in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. According to the chief coordinator of the Beekeeping Sectorial Chamber in Rio Grande do Sul, the local beekeepers are requesting from official authorities to facilitate a peaceful coexistence with other industries in the region, such as crop producers. Loeblein who is largely on the side of the beekeepers, article points out that beekeepers are not asking to ban agrochemicals in the region but instead suggest investments in trainings, in order to help certified farmers to manage chemical products responsibly. In other words, the beekeepers envision a win-win situation in the region, so they can keep their beehives safely, and at the same time that farmers can use certified pesticides in their agricultural crops. Based on official indicators from the Beekeeping Sectorial Chamber, presented in the paper almost 3,000 colonies collapsed last year. However, Loeblein goes further in explaining that, in fact, the numbers considering the mortality of bees were probably higher in the region during the studied period as beekeepers are not used to report their colonies losses to official authorities. The statistics indicating bee mortality also suggest risks for other species of bees that are not included in the present data, such as wild bees. As the article explains, only bees kept for commercial purpose (honeybee and stingless bees) are considered in these regional statistics. The paper concludes that it is critical to include also other species of bees when examining bee mortality in the region based on the role of bees for biodiversity. The next article (see Fig. 5) also printed in the newspaper Zero Hora was published one month later (published on January 26th and 27th 2019) and written by Colussi and Kervalt. The paper highlights the growing dispute between beekeepers and crop producers in Rio Grande do Sul. The paper refers to the same research studies as the above paper concluding that bee-mortality is connected to the incorrect use of pesticides in agricultural crops all around the State. According to Colussi and Kervalt (2019) article, beekeepers have notified to regional authorities the losses of entire bee colonies. The losses were estimated to be over 5,000 colonies death from December 2018 until end of January 2019 around the State. The estimation of damage expected by the regional beekeeping sector is over 150 tonnes of honey, which is equivalent to an average loss of 1.7 percent in the total honey production for the year (initially, the total projection for 2019 was around 8,9 thousand tonnes of honey). The paper raises the example of one beekeeper, who has suffered an estimated loss of almost 90 percent of his beehives and thus he lost his main monetary income. Brazilian researchers are proposing that the main villain is an

31 The term gaucho refers to the traditional cowboys from , these occur in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, generally in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The gauchos in Rio Grande do Sul have formed a culture of their own over time all around the region (Meyer 2010).

39 insecticide used in soybean crops, which contains the active substance of fipronil also found in death bees32. Yet, as Colussi and Kervalt (2019) article points out, the use of this insecticide is actually prohibited during the blooming period of soybean crops, according to a normative provision instructed by the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and Ibama33, indeed a provision that seems not to be well adhered to.

Figure 5. Photo montage collected from an article printed on the newspaper Zero Hora, concerning bee-mortality in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (Zero Hora, January 26th and 27th 2019).

32 Bees collect nectar from polluted soybean flowers and next they carry all infected nectar to the beehive; therefore, it reaches the entire colony (Colussi and Kervalt 2019). 33 Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources.

40 Again, this paper points out that in many cases, beekeepers are not reporting their losses to regional authorities around the State. Colussi and Kervalt go on to explain that one of the reasons why the beekeepers do not expose their losses properly, is due to the fact that they are placing their beehives inside other farmers properties. The landowner provides an amount of land to the beekeeper in exchange for a honey percentage per year. However, according to the paper, in many cases, farmers are not well-educated on how to manage the agricultural crops in a way that also ensures the wellbeing of the bee. According to the statistics provided by the Beekeeping Sector Chamber, only 30 percent of the colonies losses are notified to the official authority. At the same time, there are farmers who understand the value of keeping beehives near to the agricultural crops in order to increase the yields through pollination. Ultimately, Colussi and Kervalt article also suggests some alternatives of what the beekeepers should do in order to better proceed in the case of any ‘bee’ problem. For instance, the beekeepers need to learn to report atypical death of bees. In addition, in order to better protect the bee, it is necessary to improve the communication channels between beekeepers and crop producers around the region. In order to active this goal, Colussi and Kervalt article describes around an initiative named ‘Colmeia Viva’, which is a mobile app focused on beekeepers and farmers. The project aims to generate a practical space of interaction between beekeepers and farmers through a digital platform. Hence, the beekeeper can mark in an online map where he or she has placed the beehives. At the same time, the farmer can check out this information by using the same app. Moreover, farmers can notify the periods when they plan to use agrochemicals, but also what types of chemicals they are going to use in the agricultural crops. The Colussi and Kervalt article highlights that the app has emerged as a good opportunity to improve positive dialogues between different actors (e.g. crop producers, beekeepers and regional authorities). However, the app was launched in the end of 2017, and so this project still needs to reach a great number of users and, as the article suggests, there are many people who are still unaware about its existence. As the two articles have discussed, currently, there are many environmental issues in the region which are also influencing the wellbeing of the bees. With all these topics in mind, now is time for the reader meet the local beekeepers from Rio Grande do Sul and their bees.

41 5. Bee-ing There

Humans and bee’s relationships have been expressed through different levels of intimacies over time. Without a doubt, beekeepers are described as being the first ones when it comes to feel the buzz of bonding with bees, and therefore as being the most skilled ones to share their knowledge regarding bees and human’s relations. Here in this chapter I will describe two of my fieldwork experiences in more detail. As the reader will notice through this chapter, each beekeeper has an individual point of view when it comes to the personal knowledge and experience. I will try and present these interviews and the context in which they took place as illustratively as possible. With this, I also aim to illustrate to the reader how the fieldwork was carried out and the character of the conversations with the beekeepers. In this case conversations centred around their relationships with bees, their daily routines and stories with bees, and their knowledge about beekeeping. During the two visits, I was also able to photograph the different elements of the farms, which I will present in these subchapters in order to propose a better and more ‘vivid’ illustration of the farms to the reader.

5.1 Being with Stingless bees To introduce the reader to both the fieldwork context and also the physical context of the bee farm itself I will introduce the reader to the first bee farm I visited. The property holds a number of 60 stingless bee hives, or meliponaries, which is the name given to a space were stingless bees are kept. Additionally, the bee farm has 12 different species of stingless bees. The meliponaries are located in the area of Bento Gonçalves and managed by Fernando, a young beekeeper (about 30 years old) who has been managing stingless bees for three years now. When I asked to Fernando about his motivations when it comes to keep stingless bees, he explained to me that his main reason was connected to a personal desire of learning more about bees and nature. Thus, Fernando decided to start keeping stingless bees around his own property, thereby, he has been placing the beehives on the outside of the house wall (see Fig. 9-E), but also in his backyard (see Fig. 6). As will be shown here Fernando has made lot of effort also to read upon and learn about stingless bees and during my visit, he shared a lot of. In order to provide a healthy environment for the bees, Fernando explains that he has been cultivating different plants species around his property, which he knows that stingless bees appreciate. Moreover, Fernando tells me that he is famous in his neighbourhood for advancing his neighbours to grow flowers and trees that stingless bees like to forage. As Fernando says: “My neighbours know about my bees, so they always come to ask me what kind of flowers and flora the bee’s like, so they can plant in their gardens”. His advice is generally that the more nectar and pollen a flower makes, the more attractive they will look for the bees.

42

Figure 6. Meliponaries placed in the backyard of Fernando’s house in Bento Gonçalves, Rio Grande do Sul. (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). Fernando also explains that each stingless bee species has its particular characteristic and therefore it has a different size of beehive. In most of the cases, according to Fernando, there are no problems in keeping different species of stingless bee’s in the same area. This is possible to see by looking to Fig. 6, where all the beehives are positioned close to each other in Fernando’s backyard. Moreover, Fernando explains that stingless bees are also good species to keep in urban areas, especially due to the fact that they have no sting (as I explained in subchapter 1.4.2). Thus, Fernando clarifies that it is possible to keep stingless beehives in spaces such as balconies or rooftops. Fernando mentions that in fact, he kept few stingless beehives in the balcony of his old apartment during a short period of time and the stingless bees had adapted to that environment perfectly. In addition, Fernando explains briefly to me about the trendy movement of urban beekeeping and how this practice is gaining attention from different groups of people worldwide. Fernando points out that, perhaps, this ‘bee’ movement can be understood as a representation of how our modern societies are willing to ‘re-connect with nature’. Throughout the fieldwork, Fernando explains to me that the honey from stingless bee (though produced in smaller amounts) traditionally has been used for medical purposes and it works as a great antibiotic (see Fig. 7-B). In addition, Fernando describes that the propolis34 from the stingless bee is also very special and superior when it comes to its therapeutic effects (see Fig. 8-C and D). Fernando points out that nowadays, there are lots of new studies considering the stingless bee propolis as a good therapy for individuals who are looking for organic medicine. Besides, the biological composition of the propolis can change entirely depending on the type of vegetation and the range of flowers the workers bees have been visiting over the season. As Fernando explains it: Fernando: Honey from the Jataí species (a genera of stingless bee) had been used by Indians for many ages as a valued medicine in order to prevent and avoid the eye disease ‘cataract’. Unfortunately, these

34 Propolis is a water-insoluble resinous mixture of bee’s saliva and vegetable resin, which contains a wide range of important biological and therapeutic properties such as: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antiviral, analgesic, etc. (Araújo et al. 2018).

43 ancient curative traditions, which were first generated by indigenous cultures in the country…[pause], they had been lost within our modern society. In this case, Fernando stresses how important it is to reflect upon indigenous traditions and beliefs as significant sources of knowledge available in the country. Furthermore, the indigenous traditions can help to enrich the cultural value of the stingless bee, as well as act in a way of preserving cultural diversity. Here the point is that Fernando recognize these ancient traditions as the main foundation when it comes to think about meliponiculture and the history of humans and stingless bee’s relationships in Brazil.

A B

Figure 7. (A): Soft wax pots for pollen and (B): soft wax pots for honey built by stingless bees (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019).

44 C D

Figure 8. Two different types of propolis or ‘bee glue’, that is used as sealant for unwanted open spaces in the beehive. (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). As my research also includes themes related to landscape changes and environmental issues, I questioned Fernando about topics involving the stingless bees and difficulties with parasites or pests in general. Fernando tells me that he has never faced any large problem when it comes to pests, however, he explains it: Fernando: Issues with parasites or mites such as the Varroa, they are more common to happen in Europe and also with the honeybee. Sometimes, I have small issues with phorid flies35. In this case, I always use a homemade natural vinegar trap, which keeps the stingless bee colony a 100 percent organic and safe. In any case, Fernando stresses that the beekeepers who check their colonies frequently, can identify this type of infestation and, so control the phorid flies before they become a major issue in the colony. The key point here is that colony inspections are essential practices in order to minimize colony losses that are originated by pests such as the phorid flies.

35 Phorid flies (Diptera, Phoridae) are true flies that are in the group of familiar insects such as mosquitoes and house flies, with approximately 150,000 described species (Merritt et al. 2009). Moreover, phorid flies represents one of the most devasting pests when it comes to stingless bee colonies (Jaffe et al. 2015).

45 In terms of economic value, Fernando stresses that the amount of honey produced from the stingless bee does not compete with the amount of honey produced from the honeybee, although stingless bee honey is usually priced highly. Fernando explains to me that local beekeepers are also investing in practices such as multiplication of swarms, in order to obtain new young colonies for commercial purposes (as I explained in subchapter 4.2). The multiplication of colonies is a key part of meliponiculture since more colonies are needed to produce more honey, but also other stingless bee products. Fernando mentions that depending on the characteristic of each colony, prices can differ from 150 to 1000 Brazilian reais36 per new colony, and this means a good additional income for local beekeepers in the region. Furthermore, Fernando describes the sale market of queen bees which is also occurring through the internet and in commercial websites. The bees sold via internet are delivered through a regular mail box which it is unsafe for the animal. In this sense, Fernando points out the necessity of always checking on information made available in beekeeper associations regarding how to correctly proceed when obtaining new colonies or just queens. Fernando highlights that from his perspective it is essential to always visit the meliponaries personally. Consequently, Fernando can feel safe about knowing exactly what the previous conditions of the bees were before he acquire any new colony or queen. During the visiting, Fernando explains several times how he sees meliponiculture as a sustainable activity that does not harm the environment and, at the same time, it originates valuable products (e.g. honey, propolis, wax and pollen). Likewise, as Fernando points out, stingless bees are harmless to humans because they do not have any sting. Sadly, according to Fernando, most of the people are unaware about this curious characteristic and are scared about getting near to the beehives. I also questioned Fernando if stingless bees can be associated to pollinations services, especially in the studied region. Fernando explains that stingless bees can also work as good pollinators by improving crop production and the nutritional value of different plants and seeds available in the region of Rio Grande do Sul, some examples of fruits which specifically demand stingless bee pollination to succeed are strawberries and apple trees. For that matter, Fernando also points out: “In fact, stingless bees are responsible for almost all pollination services in our Brazilian native forests”. The point here is that, over the centuries, stingless bee communication systems have been developed to be three dimensional, thus it can indicate how high in the forest the pollen and the nectar sources are located. According to Fernando, deforestation is making it more and more difficult for stingless bees to freely interact with wild habitats in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. As Fernando explains it: Fernando: Stingless bees had developed mostly inside the Brazilian native forests during millions of years; therefore, deforestation and land use changes are directly associated as dangerous threats for these bee’s species. Each native tree needs a time period between 30 to 40 years to form the hollow in which the stingless bees build their nests. Stingless bees are connected to the wild habitats and native vegetation in many different levels. Thus, environmental changes in the region have affected these native bees mostly when it comes to reflect upon their relations with the landscapes and other species. Furthermore, Fernando describes around the practice of honey hunting in the region, which it is generally predatory and harmful for the stingless bee. He describes that what normally happen is that the ‘meleiros37’ harvest the honey from a nest inside the hollow

36 The or ‘BRL’ is the official currency in Brazil (Central Bank of Brazil 2019). 37 Portuguese word that describes the person who pursuits honey inside the forest.

46 tree in a way so that the colony becomes unprotected and without food. In other words, the bee colony is left to die. The negative impacts of honey hunting also include forest fires and depletion of wild habitats. In order to help saving wild stingless bee nests from dying, Fernando usually tries to be informed about logging areas of timber in native forests around the region. In a consequence, Fernando has been able to rescue several stingless bee colonies from death. In Fig. 9-F is possible to see a hollow tree with a wild nest which Fernando had rescued and placed it in his backyard. In this case, natural landscapes have been affected by causes such as deforestation and loss of wild habitat over time, and in the meantime, these changes have also originated environmental disturbances for native and wild bees living in Rio Grande do Sul. Last but not least, Fernando asked if I was interested in see how a stingless bee colony interior actually looks like. In this case, Fernando had unsealed one of the beehives (see Fig. 10), so we were able to take a good look on what the stingless bees have been doing since the beginning of the spring season. Moreover, Fernando explains that bee colonies can be considered as prototypes of sustainability in which workers bees are characterized for being extremely efficient and always working as team. For instance, the interior design and the structure of the colony built by these bees can illustrate how good they are when it comes to improve the use of spaces (such as the wax pots of honey), but also in terms of building an environment that can accommodate densely populated areas. E F

Figure 9. (E): Picture of a stingless bee hive placed outside of Fernando’s house wall. (F): Picture of a wild stingless bee nest rescued by Fernando (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019).

47

Figure 10. The nest’s internal structure in a stingless beehive. It is possible to see some soft wax pots full of honey (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). When we finished the visit and the interview, I felt very lucky in having the opportunity to learn much more about the stingless bee, meliponiculture, and also, how these native bees are interacting with humans and nature in this region. Fernando had a lot of knowledge about stingless bees and was also willing to share his knowledge. I will also include more information from my interview with Fernando in the next chapter. But first I will move to the next fieldwork experience and invite the reader to meet João and his honeybees.

5.2 Being with Honeybees In my second fieldwork experience, I visited apiaries which is the place where beehives of honeybees are kept (here referring to the Africanized honeybees). This farm produces honey for commercial sale on a larger scale and is therefore very different from Fernando’s farm. As this was a commercial bee farm, I also had the chance to see a ‘honey house’, the place where the honey for commercial trade is extracted and packed. So, in my second visit I had the opportunity to meet João (a man of about 70 years old), who has been working with honeybees and apiculture for almost 30 years now. When I asked João about his motivations to start keeping bees, João explained that he has always been passionate about animals and nature since he was a kid. João has always adored bees and

48 he decided to keep bees after he had retired from being a member of the military reserve, or in other words the ´National Guard’ of the State of Rio Grande do Sul. After João retired from his old job, he was wondering what he should do from that moment on, and so João tells me that in fact it was a very good friend of him who suggested the idea of keeping honeybees. Currently, João has a total of four apiaries and each apiary has approximately 20 beehives per bee farm. All bee farms are placed around the region of Rio Pardo in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. On my way to meet João, I was surprised about how remote and secluded the location of João’s bee farm was. The drive to the farm was almost 40 minutes on an unpaved road and with no road signs during the entire journey. Thus, the place where João keeps his beehives can be described as flawless in terms of providing the bees with wild habitat and tranquillity. When I comment on the location of his farm, João tells me that his property is approximately three hectares with native vegetation. However, as João says: “the bees are totally free, and they have been observed to fly anywhere between one to six kilometres in order to forage for nectar and pollen”. Moreover, João explains that his bee farms are surrounded by lots of native forests and the honeybees can also visit eucalyptus trees and Japanese grapes plantations which have also been growing around the area. At the same time, in order to ensure the wellbeing of the honeybees and that they have sufficient amounts of food, João points out that it is important to always think about how the natural environment is interacting with the bees during each season. João tells me that he usually harvests honey two to three times per year. Though, he believes that two times per year is the best option when it comes to the wellbeing of honeybees. João also stresses that the behaviour of the honeybee is directly affected by temperature. In this sense, honeybees start to work earlier in the morning during spring and summer, however, they can also become more aggressive during very hot periods. By contrast, the honeybees start to work later during the winter season, and most of the workers bees stay inside the hive where they form a winter cluster. As João explains it: “this is because workers bees have one central job in the winter, and that is to take care of the queen through keeping her safe and warm”. As discussed already in this study, the honeybee and the stingless bee are very different when it comes to animal characteristics and behaviours. Honeybees tend to be more aggressive when compared to stingless bees. I therefore asked João about how the relationship between him and the honeybees could be described. João explains that when he is managing the honeybees, he believes that is important to calm himself and focuses on the needs and sensibilities of the beehive. In this case, João mentions that “keeping honeybees can be related to a ‘spiritual science’ which involves the necessity of slowing your body down and observe what the honeybees really need”. Besides, the practise of keeping honeybees means that the beekeeper must pay attention to the buzz of the honeybees in order to be aware of their movements. João tells me that once he did not wear his bee suit during a very hot day and, so he had been stung by 20 honeybees. The incident he sees as a really bad experience, when managing the honeybees, it is important to be cautious and wear the beekeeping suit, veil and gloves as a way of enabling intimate relationship with the honeybees. Additionally, I also asked João about cultural values, beliefs and religion linked to the honeybees in the region. In this case, João explains that ‘Santa Rita de Cássia’ is the formal Saint when it comes to protect the bees and help the beekeepers during difficult times. For instance, according to João, one popular tale tells about that at the time Rita was still a baby, she miraculously healed a farmer, who had been deeply wounded by a scythe, through using the swarm of bees.

49 When I ask João about topics related to landscape changes and their consequences to the honeybees, the first thing that João tells me is that he feels privileged in being able to have his bee farms located surrounded by a healthy and natural environment. In this case, wild habitats and native forests have been well preserved in the area where João keeps his beehives. Meanwhile, João explains that he knows about other beekeepers who are struggling to keep their beehives in the region. For instance, landscape changes associated to the agricultural sector and the use of agrochemicals were described by João as being the main causes. Environmental issues linked to the agricultural sector and monocultures were already pointed out by the newspaper articles (see subchapter 4.3) as critical problems affecting the beekeeping industry in the Rio Grande do Sul. Furthermore, João stresses that apart from the issues regarding bee mortality through the use of agrochemicals, these chemicals are also negatively affecting the quality of the honey. As already explained in previous chapters, Brazil is known as a country who produces and sells organic honey, however, this also means that the beekeeping sector needs to follow strict organic requirements in order to ensure compliance within this market segment. The honey harvested from his apiaries it is, as he says, a 100 percent organic and natural. The local beekeeper association (which João is being part of) has recently established that all new beehives need to be made of pure wood. Besides, the beehives cannot be painted (in the past the beekeepers painted the beehives in order to help mark their positions). In addition, beekeepers are not allowed to apply paraffin or any other kind of chemical product in the surface of the wood boxes. Fig. 11 illustrates some old beehives that were already painted before this new regulation was introduced in the region. In this sense, João also explains his position on 100 percent organic honey, in terms of the importance of being able to deliver an organic and high-quality honey into a competitive marketplace. Here the key point is that the improvements on the hives are all worth it, ultimately, due to the reason that, as João has pointed out: “these new protocols are also increasing the wellbeing of the bees and the maintenance of nature”. In this case, it is possible to perceive that João, who is a beekeeper that has been keeping honeybees for 30 years now, is also worried about how the landscape changes have disturbed the environments which the honeybees are known to rely on.

50

Figure 11. Apiary in Rio Pardo, Rio Grande do Sul. The beehives are placed around a natural vegetation and under native trees (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). As I discussed in subchapter 4.3, there are many problems concerning how the beekeepers need to find new methods of getting better support from the regional authorities and other groups of influence, in order to protect the bees and improve the beekeeping sector. In this sense, I was also interested in discussing how the local beekeeper’s associations have been organized in the county and how these associations have changed over time. João explains that, as a matter of fact, the member of the beekeeper association in Rio Pardo had decided to close it down in 2019, due to the lack of interest and involvement by its associated members. This is a bad sign of the motivation of the beekeepers in terms of searching for improvements within the beekeeping sector in Rio Pardo. At the same time, João tell me that at this moment, he is in charge of the beekeeper association in Santa Cruz (another county near to Rio Pardo), which is very well-organized, with a total of 85 active members. Additionally, all members have access to the honey house owned by the association, and moreover, the members are invited to participate in the official meetings that happen every month. At this point in the conversation, it was possible to observe how excited João was in terms of being able to share with others these achievements of actually having active members in order to discuss future improvements in the beekeeping sector in the region.

5.2.1 Honey House When visiting João I also had the opportunity to visit a honey house, which is the place where the honey is extracted, processed and bottled. João explains that it is important to have a special space to process honey which it is not inside people’s regular houses. This is because processing honey in private home provides the risk of contamination from

51 other food items. As João clarifies: “Honey is a food product and as a beekeeper I need to ensure all cleanliness of any area that is related to my sale product”. Hence, a separate honey house is safer and required when processing38 honey for commercial sale depending on the country food legislation. Throughout the honey house visiting, João has described each step in the ‘honey process’ in order to illustrate what happens once the honey is ready to be harvested by the beekeepers. For this reason, here I will present the content shared by João at the moment we were visiting the honey house. This part can be characterized as being more practical and business-oriented in terms of observing the beekeeping practices. To begin with, João points out that the first step before harvesting the honey is to check out the honey frames. In this case, if the honey is ripe39 it means that the honey is ready to be harvested. João also describes that a beehive consists of several layers of so-called honey supers, thereby, honey supers are wooden boxes filled with frames where the honeybees build their honeycomb. In order to feel safe while removing the frames from the beehive, the beekeepers need to wear their bee suits (see Fig. 13-F) the whole time during the process. Additionally, João explains to me that beekeepers need to use a bee smoker40, in order to make the honeybees slow down at the time their hives are opened so that the beekeepers can manage them easily. Throughout the process of opening the beehive, it is possible that this activity also includes the sad sacrifice of a few honeybees, which can be killed while the beekeeper is moving and replacing the frames. After this process, the boxes are taken inside the honey house. So, João describes how the next step is to remove wax cappings from each cell of the honeycomb with the help of a cappings scratcher (see Fig. 12-A). At this point, it is possible that a few honeybees which were enclosed to the frames, may also be inside the honey house. João points to a small hole (see Fig. 13-D) in a window inside the honey house and, he tells me: “the aim of this hole is to help honeybees find their way out of the honey house”.

38 The equipment for the honey extraction must be made of stainless steel in order to provide a complete hygiene during the entire process (FAO 2009). 39 Honeybees cap each cell with beeswax in order to keep the honey sealed and protected (FAO 2009). 40 The bee smoker consists of a variety of plants (e.g. pine needles, burlap, etc.) in which the beekeeper puffs a little smoke near the entrance of the beehive before it is opened. As a consequence, the bees cannot smell each other’s alarm and the bees can stay calm and confused (FAO 2009).

52 A B

C

Figure 12. Equipment to extract and bottle honey: (A) Cappings scratcher; (B)Settling tank; (C) Honey buckets and filters (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). João explains that once uncapped, the honey frames are placed in a honey extractor (see Fig. 13-E), which will spin the honey causing the liquid honey to be expelled from the honeycomb by a centrifugal force. The extractor keeps spinning for several minutes until the flow of honey reduced to a trickle. After this, João needs to remove the empty frames and insert full frames of honey. Honey buckets and filter (see Fig. 12-C) are placed under the spout of the honey extractor. Once the honey reach at the bottom of the extractor it is possible to open the honey spout and the honey runs out into a bucket. The honey is then sieved into a settling tank where impurities rise to the top (see Fig. 12-B) (this stage can take until 48 hours). Finally, the honey is decanted into fresh buckets (see Fig. 13-G) and marked with the month and the year of the harvest. After this long process, João carries all honey buckets to his local beekeeper association where specialists examine the honey, and thus labelled up with official information in order to attain sale purposes. After the extraction, João points out that he put all honey frames near to the beehives, so the honeybees can clean up the mess and make good use of all the leftover honey and wax. In this sense, João also explains about how amazing creature’s bees can be, and how they left nothing go to waste.

53 D E

F G

Figure 13. Inside of a Honey House: (D) Window hole; (E) Honey extractor; (F) Bee suit and veil; (G) Honey buckets (Photo credit: Sara Onsten 2019). After we finished the visit and the interview, I contemplated that though the experience was quite different from the visit with Fernando and his stingless bees, João also had a passionate interest in sharing his knowledge on the honeybees and his interaction with them. At the same time, both the beekeepers focused on different issues when it comes to their experiences with bees and beekeeping over time, and also their personal motivations and relationships with their bees. Yet, both there brought up topics such as landscape changes and human-animal relations relating to the environmental issues in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. The reader will meet Fernando and João further in the coming chapter where I will discuss these issues further and in more detail.

54 6. Beekeepers Analysis

Having introduced you now to the broader history of beekeeping in Brazil and two different examples of beekeepers, it is time for us to meet other beekeepers in the Rio Grande do Sul and their bees in more detail. In this chapter, I will analyse the data which I collected and recorded through semistructured interviews with few selected beekeepers (see subchapter 2.3). The chapter has been structured on the basis of the themes related to my research questions (see subchapter 1.2). It is important to remark that the beekeepers presented here in this study are representative only of themselves and they are only reflecting on their own experiences regarding bees. Each beekeeper is unique here, and each of them has been describing his or her particular experience, point of view and knowledge. In this sense, I will also adapt the concept of storytelling (see subchapter 2.3) in order to reflect upon the beekeeper’s stories and relationships with their bees. I have structured this chapter in two subchapters. In the first subchapter, I will focus on the relationships between bees and beekeepers and their overall characteristics. In addition, I will explore some beekeeper’s conversations regarding landscape changes and challenges when it comes to the bees and the beekeeping sector in the region. In the second subchapter, I will discuss the opportunities, motivations and obstacles for beekeeping in the region as noticed by the beekeepers.

6.1 To (bee) or not to (bee)

6.1.1 Motivations and relations with bees Here I will first introduce you to Tanara, an adorable middle age woman who decided to keep honeybees (here the Africanized honeybee) about 20 years ago, initially, in order to have a hobby. Tanara has developed a strong relationship with the honeybees over time, as well as deep levels of attachment when it comes to protect and care about them. When I asked Tanara about her motivations regarding keeping honeybees, Tanara explained to me that she had always dreaming about keeping honeybees and for a long time she was wondering how the beekeeping practice functioned in general. Tanara’s journey as a beekeeper started when she decided to keep the honeybees in her husband’s dairy farm in the region of Tapes in Rio Grande do Sul. At that period, the dairy farm had a couple of beehives placed in the property already. However, the beehives were not being well managed for harvesting honey or to produce any type of honeybee product. Thus, having the opportunity to manage the honeybees inside her husband farm seemed to be the perfect chance for her personal interest in beekeeping. Tanara acquired some new colonies in order to improve the honey yields, and she took an apiculture course. In the same period, Tanara met her apiculture instructor who has been advising her on beekeeping until the present days. Eventually, Tanara learnt how to manage the honeybees properly and how to use the equipment to harvest the honey. Furthermore, Tanara told me that, since the very beginning, the practice of keeping honeybees turned

55 to be a wonderful experience to her, both as a hobby and as a small business. Tanara honours this wonderful experience by labelling her honey as ‘Mel do Paraíso’ (e.g. Paradise Honey). When I asked Tanara about her relationship with the honeybees, Tanara explained that she feels respect and admiration for what the bees do as animals, but also for how they do it. Tanara goes on to describe how the honeybees are hard workers who always put the colony interest and benefit in the first place. She also pointed out that the honeybees are truly unselfish animals, due to the fact that they sacrifice themselves (when they sting) in order to protect the colony from outsiders. In this context, Tanara also explained that she became very attached to her queen bees for the reason that each queen is the heart of the colony and in this case the hive does not sustain without her existence. At some point during the interview, Tanara revealed that a few years ago her husband decided to sell the dairy farm because their family did not have enough time to take care of the property. When I asked Tanara about what happened to her beehives due to this time, the expression on her face changes and she looks very sad. The reason of her sadness was because the new owner of the property said to Tanara that he would not keep the apiaries there. In fact, he was planning to destroy everything if Tanara wouldn’t be able to shift her beehives to another area. As Tanara burst out when telling this story: Tanara: I didn’t want this to happen to the beehives! My family and friends know how much I care about the honeybees and consider them as my ‘tiny friends’! For this reason, I decided to talk to an old friend of mine – who in fact is a next-door neighbour in our old farm - and I proposed to him to keep my beehives in his property. So, in exchange to that I offered him an amount of the honey per year. [pause] So guess what happened? he said yes! In the end I was so grateful for being able to keep my honeybees and also the honey of ‘Mel do Paraíso’! To cut a long story short, Tanara explained that through managing the honeybees over time, she has also developed intimate relationships with them, and thus she felt the need of protecting them. Moreover, Tanara observed that this sense of protection and responsibility in terms of how she relates to the honeybees will last for as long as she lives. I asked Tanara how people react when she tells others that she keeps honeybees and also about her history. Tanara explained that people usually express admiration and curiosity regarding her involvement with the honeybees and her knowledge on apiculture. Yet, she also pointed out: Tanara: Sadly, many people still seem to observe most of the honeybees with some sort of fear or uncertainty. In many cases, I receive questions concerning what the right way to proceed in case of being stung by a honeybee. As Tanara says, there are many more amazing facts when it comes to the honeybee, and yet, in most of the cases, people do not ask for further information or just ignore these facts. For Tanara, her relationship with the honeybees can also be characterized as a practice which provides her with peaceful sensations and increase her attention. Perhaps for the beekeepers the moment in which they manage their bees is similar to a ritual, and moreover, for many seen almost as a method of meditating or practicing their ‘yoga’. Perhaps this is because as João explained in previous chapter handling bees requires an absolute presence. Tanara also told me stories about different beekeeper’s ‘everyday’ situations, from going to places such as forests, roof of houses and water tanks, in order to rescue honeycombs or wild nests. With this in mind, Tanara pointed out: “It is so sad

56 you know…[pause] usually when people find out a swarm built inside their private houses, they just want to use insecticides or destroy the entire colony!”. Moving forward, now I will introduce you to Beatriz, a very nice and funny woman that is now around her 70 years old. Without a shadow of a doubt, Beatriz was the most experienced beekeeper I had the opportunity to interview for this study. Beatriz has been keeping the honeybees (here Africanized honeybee) for more than 40 years now in the region of Rio Pardo in Rio Grande do Sul. Besides, Beatriz was the first beekeeper to build a proper honey house in the county, and also to acquire all the legal requirements, in order to produce and sell the honey and other bee products in national and international markets. As a result of this experience, Beatriz is known as being the ‘wise’ beekeeper in the region, who can always give valuable advices and help answering questions regarding the beekeeping practice and the honeybee’s behaviours. However, due to some problems that I will discuss in the next section, nowadays, Beatriz is not managing the honeybees for commercial purposes anymore. Beatriz still keeps five beehives at her property in order to continue being able to interact with the honeybees, which it is an activity that she really loves to experience. Beatriz’s relationship with the honeybees started as a hobby but quickly changed to become also for commercial purposes as a ‘routine activity’ of her life. Beatriz explained that, since the beginning, she felt really comfortable in the presence of honeybees and their unstoppable buzz. This feeling of ‘effective buzz’, have been described by Moore and Kosut (2013:88) as a form of insect love, which happens with the beekeeper through bonding with bees. Beatriz also pointed out that through the smells and sounds in the beehives, she attempts to understand what her honeybees might need at each moment. In this sense, Beatriz explained that the buzz can also be compared to a type of ‘energy’, which helps to boost physical and mental vitality for the beekeepers. Furthermore, I asked Beatriz if she had other stories to tell when it comes to how to protect and manage the honeybees. Beatriz then described how she had participated during many years as a member in the ‘SOS Bee’ project in the region. The project focused on rescuing the honeybee colonies which had been found in different unusual places, for instance in the roofs of houses, water tanks, inside old sofas or old stoves and etc. Instead of allowing people to destroy or use insecticides in the nests, the SOS Bee team removes the nests and put them into safe environments. Nowadays, Beatriz cannot participate in the project any longer because she needs to take care of her physical health. Although Beatriz keeps telling people about the project, in order to make local communities aware of how important it is to notify the bee rescue team available in the region. For this reason, the relationship between the beekeeper and the bees also creates a sense of responsibility and purpose by considering the bees and their wellbeing, the beekeeper has established the ‘duty’ to protect them. At the same time landscape changes and agricultural practices makes this protection increasingly hard. I will now move on to discuss how the beekeepers and their bees have experienced the environmental issues in the region.

6.1.2 Landscape changes and challenges In earlier chapters in this thesis I discussed how the bee wellbeing relies on the natural ecosystems and their components, which also enable the bee to interact positively with other species. At the same time, I also explored topics concerning some recent environmental issues and their consequences for the bees living in Rio Grande do Sul. In this case, landscape changes were defined by the interviewed beekeepers, as one of the

57 main causes affecting the bee’s wellbeing and their pollination services. According to Beatriz, who has kept the honeybees for more than 40 years now, both the beekeeping sector and the natural environment have changed considerably during the last ten years in the region: Beatriz: Ten years ago, the beekeeping sector was going very well in the region. For instance, I was exporting the honey and other honeybee products to many international markets. Now, there are lots of problems arising from the agricultural sector and the use of pesticides. Honeybees colonies are too weak and unhealthy. Beatriz also explained that she had her old honey house located near to agricultural crops and monocultures. Therefore, she quickly noticed when the environmental issues linked to the irresponsible use of pesticides reached her beehives. For this reason, Beatriz decided to sell almost all of her beehives and this is also why she is no longer selling honey commercially. Beatriz told me that she became afraid of reaching a point where she would be losing everything. So, she sold her honey house and all her equipment to extract and bottle honey. While Beatriz was telling me about all these events, from her body language and voice I could tell she was really feeling upset about this situation. Moreover, Beatriz pointed out that there are other animal species in the region which have also been suffering from the landscape changes. In the same way as the bees, other animals also feed from the available native vegetation and, in many cases, these native vegetations are contaminated by agrochemicals. As Beatriz described: Beatriz: I was used to sit outside in my garden and see seriemas41, lots and lots of seriemas every day. Now, I haven’t seen any seriema for a long time. And that is the same with other animal species such as hares and partridge. Additionally, Beatriz has also heard stories about dogs, ducks and other animals that were poisoned by ingesting polluted plants and other natural resources in the surrounding areas. With this in mind, Beatriz mentioned that in the last couple of months, there have been more official publications by the local newspapers discussing issues related to the bee mortality and its main causes in Rio Grande do Sul. As Beatriz stressed: “perhaps these recent articles have emerged as a good indication that our regional authorities are finally recognizing that something is going wrong with our natural environment”. The key point here, as I also explored in subchapter 4.3, is that the local beekeepers are willing to find a solution that would provide the bees with a healthy environment, but at the same time, would not disturb the agricultural sector in the region. In this case, Beatriz also underlined the critical need of explaining to the other actors (here mostly the farmers and the regional government) that through protecting the bees they are also improving other important themes both biodiversity and also pollination services, the latter which increase the yield of crops. Turning now to the interview with Fernando presented in the previous chapter, since he started with meliponiculture, he has never experienced any problem involving his stingless bees and the use of pesticides. In any case, Fernando highlighted that he keeps his meliponaries inside his private property, which is located in a residential area, thus the stingless bees are not interacting near to agricultural crops. However, Fernando told me the story of a friend of his who has his meliponaries in a rural area. The friend

41 The Seriema is a South American bird of grasslands, constituting the family Cariamidae. They feed on insects, snails, reptiles and berries (Britannica 2019).

58 experienced the loss of a number between 30 to 40 colonies, due to the incorrect use of agrochemicals from a neighbouring farm. In particular, Fernando as Beatriz, emphasized the lack of communication among the beekeepers and the farmers as a critical challenge in order to increase the wellbeing of the bees and their preservation. The beekeepers understand that through improving the communication, perhaps it would be possible to reduce the loss of colonies around the State significantly. Yet, Fernando explained that the technology has already improved in several aspects the levels of interaction for the beekeepers as an actor who is looking for changes. As Fernando explained it: Fernando: Rio Grande do Sul is facing lots of problems almost every single day when it comes to the bee mortality. At the same time, information is generally available to people who work with the bees and in the beekeeping sector. For instance, I receive messages in my phone every day (from beekeeper’s groups on WhatsApp) informing about different topics such as the losses of colonies in different areas around the State and new conservation projects. In Fernando’s opinion, the newspapers and social medias are not sharing enough articles and statistics regarding this environmental issue. I also asked Fernando in case if he had any clue why the local newspapers are not discussing the bee mortality in more detail. One of the reasons, he says, may be related due to the fact that the beekeeping sector is not that ‘significant’, when compared to certain agricultural crops (e.g. soybean crops and rice plantations) and their economic values for the State. At the same time, in the last year there were some big problems involving the incorrect use of herbicides in soybean crops, which had also reached out grapes and olive tree crops. The monetary value of grapes and olives makes these crops extremely valuable for the State. As a consequence, several official debates were organized by the regional government and the farmers, to discuss how to avoid the incorrect use of agrochemicals. In connection with these debates there was also a discussion on the economic and environmental consequences of agrochemicals for the agrobusiness sector. Turning back to João’s interview, he also commented that another issue is related to the practice of using aircraft in order to release pesticides in the agricultural crops. The point here is that aerial spraying can spread all over other areas such as lakes and wild habitats, which are frequently visited by the bees. Thus, João argued that the beekeeper’s associations are always requesting stricter measures to avoid further losses of colonies from the use of pesticides, but also to reduce the pollution of natural environments: João: In my opinion, there is still a lack of knowledge from the farmers, who are producing our food. Many of them are not aware that bees play a vital role in contributing to the maintenance of biodiversity. But even more importantly [here João referred to the farmers economic interests] the bees also contribute as primary pollinating agents. Therefore, they increase the agricultural crops and the seed nutritional value. What else the farmers need?! Like the other interviewed beekeepers, João here mentioned articles discussing about the bee mortality and its underlying reason that had been published in the recent year in the newspaper. The last topic that João brought up for our discussion was regarding the economic situation in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, which in general is not going well for many farmers. As a consequence, there are farmers who are obtaining smuggled pesticides, which are cheaper, however, many of these pesticides are prohibited to be used

59 on crops. Thus, there are also a necessity of investing on a better monitoring system when it comes to control the illegal trade of agrochemicals in the region. I also asked Tanara about her experience when it comes to landscape changes and environmental issues which could have influenced in her honeybees. Regarding topics considering the use of pesticides and the bee’s mortality, Tanara said that her honeybees never faced any problem linked to these matters. Though Tanara revealed another ‘uncommon’ situation: Tanara: There was one particular year that the honeybees visited the tobacco plantations instead of the eucalyptus trees and the native flowers. As a result, the honey harvested during that period tasted as tobacco. So, it was not possible for me to sell or consume the honey harvested in that season. Here it is another important thing in terms of being a beekeeper and, thus, always reflecting on how the honeybees interact with nature. In this particular case, Tanara explained that even though a beekeeper is ‘in charge’ in terms of managing the beehives, it is impossible for the beekeeper to ‘choose’ or control which environments the honeybees will visit to forage for nectar and pollen. The key point here is that the relationships between beekeepers and bees constantly shift between terms such as: pets, wild animals, ‘machines’ (e.g. while producing honey) and so on. As we have seen in these sections, the relationships between these beekeepers and their bees can be described as being complex both when considering their emotional aspects and, also, their physical entanglements. I will now move on to the next part in this chapter, which will focus on other ‘bee’ themes that were also brought up for discussion by the beekeepers during the interviews.

6.2 Beyond the buzz As Moore and Kosut (2013:213) have observed: “bees are hard to pin down because they are not static; they are always working and on the move”. This ‘not static’ characteristic can also relate to the bees when considering the opportunities and the discoveries that humans have constantly been associating to them over time. In this sense, here I will explore alternative topics which the beekeepers have brought up as prospects in order to promote the beekeeping practice and to better engage people’s relations with bees. Tanara highlighted the importance of the honey as a valued food since ancient times. Moreover, she explained that, since the time when she was a child, her father followed the macrobiotic diet, which constitutes a diet of whole pure prepared types of food based on major principles such as: eat locally grown foods and eat seasonally. As a consequence, throughout her life, Tanara has always thought about the importance of eating natural and organic food. These same ecological values influenced her when she started to keep the honeybees and produce the honey. As Tanara says, there have been an increase in the interest in the value of eating local and organic products from our modern society. There are many restaurants which have asked her to give information regarding the honey origin (e.g. blossom honey, monofloral honey, multifloral honey, etc.) and history, so the restaurants can write these down in their food menus. These ‘green movements’ have also reached out the honey market, in which the beekeepers can describe the unique characteristics of their honey (Moore and Kosut 2013:185). Such efforts of labelling also increase notions towards the ‘green consumerism’. In this case,

60 the beekeeping practice emerges as a great opportunity for the individuals who look for new ways of investing in green markets and promoting more sustainable approaches. At the same time, as Fernando pointed out: “honey is not a simple topic of discussion”, and that is related to major issues concerning the adulteration of honey, which means that, in many cases, there are producers who dilute different syrups (e.g. from corn, rice, wheat, etc.) into the pure honey (Apimondia 2019). The honey fraud is considered as a criminal and intentional act committed in order to obtain an economic gain with a product that is not up to standards (idem). In this case, Fernando explained that the international food authorities and researchers have been working to combat the honey fraud worldwide, through the increase of the honey’s traceability and methods for testing honey. Therefore, Fernando suggested that there are opportunities for the beekeepers who are inspired to ‘defend the honey’s image’ as a natural product and deliver to the market a pure and organic honey. In this context, Beatriz also explained that another opportunity when considering the beekeeping practice is related to the bee’s pollination services and how the local beekeepers can invest more in practices such as the migratory beekeeping and the commercial rent of beehives. For instance, Beatriz gave the example of the apple tree, which is produced in large scale in the State of Rio Grande do Sul and relies on the bee’s pollination in order to bear fruit. In this case, the beekeepers would also be able to earn more money from renting their beehives during periods when the bees are not producing honey. However, Beatriz stressed that before investing in such activities, the beekeepers need to ensure that the beekeepers associations would be supported by the regional authorities in order to protect their bees from any eventual complication. In many cases, the relationship between humans and bees is defined around the honey, which is the best-known product of the bees with also great commercial purposes. However, many beekeepers have moved beyond the use value interest to consider the beekeeping as practice towards ecological conservation. In addition, there is an interest in the biocultural values, that are also associated to the bees: Tanara: I do believe that beekeeping emerges as a great approach in order to raise people’s ecological awareness. For this reason, it is also my responsibility, as a beekeeper, to go beyond and participate more in this educational task, through telling my stories and relations with the honeybees and my beekeeping experience with other people. Tanara understand her experience and relation with her bees as something that can encourage other people to think through the bees as a highly valuable species, that must be protected and celebrated. As Tanara, Fernando also explained that, since he was a child, he has been questioning himself about: “how he could help to protect nature and safe wild animals from extinction”. Fernando worries deeply about deforestation and the loss of biodiversity. As a consequence, Fernando described that he constantly attempts to search for new forms of protecting the natural environment. The practice of keeping stingless bees emerged as a great way for him to fulfil his ecological ambitions. In fact, Fernando has always known that through meliponiculture, he also helps to increase other ecosystem services (such as pollination) and to protect native animal species that are in danger of extinction. However, Fernando also pointed out that when he started keeping stingless bees, he did not know that there were many more aspects connecting the importance of the bees (and other animal pollinators) for the maintenance of the biodiversity. The practice of beekeeping also functioned as a way of improving

61 Fernando’s ecological knowledge and the way he sees the interactions between the bees, the nature and the human beings in our world: Fernando: Increase ecological awareness within our modern society is something which can take time and it needs our persistence. For instance, this can be compared to an ‘ colony work’, with small steps, day after day. Or in this case, a ‘bee colony work’ [laughs] thus we can be inspired by the worker bee, who needs to visit 50 to 100 flowers during one trip. Fernando highlighted that, nowadays, there are many ways of searching for high-quality information available on the internet and through other organizations and initiatives, which are also trying to raise awareness about the importance of bees for the maintenance of the planet’s biodiversity. But ultimately, for him keeping bees himself has led to him having a better understanding of ecological relationships.

62 7. Concluding Discussion

Throughout this research I have had the aim of understanding how the relationships between beekeepers and bees have evolved over time in the region of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. As explained previously, I focused my study on a few individual beekeepers, who have openly shared their own perspectives and stories about their relations with bees, as well as their struggles in the process of managing bees over time. As Chapters 5 and 6 have shown, each beekeeper has his or her own story and understandings when it comes to describing the relationship, motivation and overall history with bees. As a consequence, it was possible to see that people who decide to keep bees do not follow a ‘straight path’. Fernando, João, Tanara and Beatriz have revealed here their own philosophical and emotional relationship with their bees. However, beekeepers also brought up similar topics for discussion. For instance, one of these topics is related to the beekeeper’s concerns while describing how environmental changes in the region have disturbed the wellbeing of the bees. Another topic discussed here refers to the fact that the beekeepers have been developed strong attachment with their bees over time. As discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 4, bees are facing a number of challenges nowadays and, in most of the cases, these challenges have been associated to environmental changes both on a local and global scale. Even though we grew up in a multispecies world, with so many living organisms and biodiversity, we (as humans) still recognise ourselves as being at the top of the so-called ‘animal kingdom’. At the same time there are many everyday situations which we interact with other species and environments without thinking responsibly. As explained in Chapter 2, human-animal relations are often being represented as human-centred and, therefore human’s interests in supporting animal species are also mostly defined by this anthropocentric perspective. Currently, bees have been chosen by humans as one of the ‘key’ species due to their representatives of influencing on the ‘global food security’, but also as bio-indicators of the environmental health. As a result, our modern society have become more aware of the ‘bee-presence’ and have started questioning how human’s actions will be impacting on their wellbeing. Moore and Kosut (2013:21) have stressed the significance of the buzz not just within the context of the bee-sound, but also within the meaning of making us constantly aware of the bee-existence. Therefore, if bees do really stop buzzing in the world, this would be a tangible reminder of human fragility and indeed of the fragility of the global ecology.

7.1 (Bee) present and (Bee) positive

To answer the first two questions presented in this thesis: (1) What is the history of beekeeping in Brazil and how has the practice developed in the country over time? and (2) How do local beekeepers from Rio Grande do Sul define and explain their relations with their bees? I primarily focused on the overall history of the beekeeping sector in Brazil, which have been shaped by historical events and societal changes in the way people have experienced and interacted with the honeybee and the stingless bee over time.

63 The introduction of the Africanized honeybee in Brazil can be described as one of the most important historical events (see Chapter 4), which influenced within the beekeeping sector and also impacted on environmental and economic areas. One can argue that in the past, the wish of engineering a new bee species (here the Africanised honeybee) which was classified as being stronger than the European honeybee, can be compared to today’s wish to engineer superior agricultural crops, through investing in better pollination systems that also depends on the bees conditions. However, as we learnt from the Africanized honeybee experiment such technofixes have great repercussions. Brazilian beekeepers and researchers have been investing more efforts to promote meliponiculture around the country as well as the conservation of the stingless bees and their biocultural values for the rural communities (e.g. Indigenous medicine and ancient traditions). Stingless bees have also been described as good examples of bee’s species to keep in urban areas because they do not represent any risk to humans. In order to learn more about the practice of beekeeping in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, I presented the reader with two fieldwork experiences (see Chapter 5). In particular I was inspired by the notion of being able to see both the apiculture and meliponiculture practices and, further how beekeepers move and embody each of these practices. I was able to observe the divergent ways that beekeepers manage their bees and reflect upon their basic needs. In Chapters 5 and 6, beekeepers have fully revealed thoughts on how they always learn from the bees and how they get inspired about the way bees interact whether in social situations or natural environments. With regards to my next two questions: (3) What are the main benefits and challenges of beekeeping according to practitioners? and (4) How can beekeeping create ecological awareness and be promoted for the benefit of agrobiodiversity? Beekeepers have identified several benefits and challenges to keep bees in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. Beekeepers have clearly highlighted how the bees are repetitively contributing with something to humans. The bee-benefits can be seen in so many forms (e.g. honey, beeswax, medicines, etc.), but also with complex structures of interaction (e.g. pollination and biocultural values). Furthermore, beekeeping contributes towards the maintenance of biodiversity and preservation of wild habitats. As this study discussed, the practice of beekeeping can be described as an economic and social activity oriented towards sustainability and inclusivity. When it comes to the challenges within the beekeeping sector in the region, beekeepers have also pointed out important environmental issues as being responsible for the loss of the bees over time. As subchapter 4.3 examined, the bee- mortality, which is severe right now in the region, have been associated to the agricultural industry and further through the incorrect use of pesticides and landscape changes. The lack of communication amongst beekeepers, farmers and regional authorities can be underlined as one of the most urgent issues for further discussion and improvement. Even though researchers and the Brazilian government have studied the bee-mortality and other environmental issues in Rio Grande do Sul, there is still the necessity of investing more on efficient dialogues, in order to protect beekeeper’s associations and the bee’s wellbeing. The ways in which beekeepers experience their relations with bees in this study has also led to the study of concepts involving topics from ecological awareness and agrobiodiversity. In this case, there is a strong indication from the beekeepers interviewed here that beekeeping emerges as a means to advocate politically for biological diversity and conservation of bees, by increasing dialogues among different actors (here crops producers, regional authorities and local communities) in the region of Rio Grande do Sul. As already discussed, bees are playing an important role when it comes to regulating

64 ecosystem services (through pollination), but also by promoting biocultural values in the region such as the indigenous medical traditions and the preservation of native forests and flowers. As a consequence, beekeepers can be seen as important actors in order to increase and promote ecological awareness in Rio Grande do Sul.

7.2 The Bee Revolution As I hope to have shown with this thesis, how bees and humans are interconnected in so many ways from providing us with food to supporting our biocultural values and, thereby bees are an integral part of our everyday life. By contrast, bees are also a superorganism suffering due to human’s interventions in the natural environment, which is now threatening bees globally. In this context, new ecological movements and the idea of interacting more sustainably with natural environments and other living species resonates within our modern society. As I was able to reflect upon these environmental issues which are also connected to bee-human interactions, I started wondering about further questions, what is the appropriate first ‘move’ for instance in order to create a better dialogue between the agricultural industry and the beekeeping sector in the region of Rio Grande do Sul? As I discussed in previous chapters, beekeepers are willing to find a balance in order to positively cooperate with crops producers. Bee pollination support a large range of foods which are produced by the agricultural systems. Here the key point is that all the actors are interlinked and depending on the bee’s wellbeing. As Moore and Kosut (2013:25) have stressed: “If tiny flying insects can survive within landscapes of overconsumption, pollution and gentrification with limited resources, maybe there is hope for humans”. Ultimately, it is impossible to anticipate all the consequences of our environmental actions and changes. Here the central point is that we need to constantly remind ourselves about ‘the butterfly effect’. This concept was popularized by the fiction writer Ray Bradbury in 1952, explaining how small actions can have large or unintentional consequences. The loss of bees and further the loss of bee’s pollination services can be seen as an illustration of how local environmental changes can rapidly be connected to global environmental issues. For this reason, I also wonder how beekeepers can better promote their ecological awareness within other actors such as local communities and encourage them to design pollinator paradises and diverse landscapes? In subchapter 3.2.1, I was inspired by the idea of improving vegetation and green spaces, no matter where, through designing friendly spaces for bees and other animal pollinators. In this sense, I do believe such local conservation initiatives can emerge as an important theme for further discussion. Advocating for a ‘Bee Revolution’ also involves some human’s lifestyle changes and better communication within the multispecies world which, as this study has shown, could lead to a more ethical and sustainable relationship between humans and bees.

65 References

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