“This,” explained Chico Filho, gesturing to the lush, flowering Caatinga shrubland surrounding us, “is the bees’ pasture.” Chico Filho, a state extension officer and avid beekeeper, was reflecting on the changes in small farmers’ perception and actions toward the Caatinga, the biodiverse ecoregion unique to Northeast Brazil characterized by shrubs, thorn trees, and ongoing deforestation. The faint buzzing of bees accompanied our conversation as Chico Filho led a farmhand (and fellow beekeeper) and me along a path through the Caatinga to one of the apiaries (bee yards) on Fazenda Normal.[1] In that moment, I told Chico Filho that I thought his use of the word pasture to contrast caring for cattle and bees to be quite astute. It was the first time I had heard a beekeeper describe the vegetation bees forage for pollen and nectar like this. At the same time, while cattle also graze on the Caatinga shrubbery during the rainy season, “pasture” typically refers to the fodder grown to feed cattle throughout the dry season. Despite cows and bees sharing shrubland during the rainy season, cattle raising and dairy farming—principal agricultural practices in the region—have promoted deforestation of the Caatinga to provide dry-season pasture for cattle. Conversely, beekeeping has promoted small farmers to become advocates for the conservation of the robust shrubland. These diverging processes of “pasture” production beseech different values related to maintaining the integrity of the Caatinga. To help bees to produce honey, farmers must act as stewards of the Caatinga landscape.
Chico Filho points out specific trees of the Caatinga as we walk to one of the apiaries on Fazenda Normal. (Photo: Author)
Although small-scale beekeeping can contribute to forest conservation, reforestation, and agroecological practices (Patel et al., 2021), whether there is a causal relationship is less conclusive (Chanthayod et al., 2017). However, reflections by beekeepers in the sertão, or hinterlands, of Ceará indicate that, at least for some, the act of beekeeping has cultivated greater appreciation for the negative consequences of clearing land and using pesticides to facilitate farming and cattle raising, prompting the beekeeper to act more consciously to conserve the forested areas. Over the past thirty years this mentality has grown with the influx of small-scale beekeeping and honey production in Ceará, which has been accompanied by technical assistance provided by government agencies and non-governmental organizations. As a part of this process, traditional methods of foraging honey from beehives in the Caatinga have been largely replaced by the cultivation of bees in artificial wooden hives. In this post, I explore how the adoption of contemporary beekeeping methods by former meleiros (honey hunters or foragers) in the sertão of Ceará has largely promoted greater connectedness between bees and the people who collect their honey.
Honey Foragers
Across the globe, the practices of honey foraging and consumption can be traced back to the early hominins (Crittenden, 2011). In Northeast Brazil, meleiros foraged honey exclusively from native meliponines, or stingless bees, until the introduction of the Apis mellifera ligustica, colloquially known as the Italian bee, in the 1950s. In Ceará, honey foraging has decreased in popularity with the rise of apiculture toward the beginning of the 21st century.[2] During interviews on the experience of honey foraging in the past, beekeepers scarcely mentioned encountering meliponines. Rather, they shared stories of swollen faces and occasional deaths due to beestings while foraging honey from the forest hives of Africanized bees, a hybrid of the more docile A. m. lingustica and more aggressive East African lowland honeybee (A. m. scutellata).[3] Wearing shorts, flipflops, and sometimes a short-sleeve shirt, men (and less often, women) would typically use a dried termite nest as a smoke source to smoke the bees out of their hive. Then they would squeeze out the honey from the waxy honeycombs into a bucket with their hand. Larvae, dirt, sweat, and whatever else happened to be on the meleiro’s hand would be added to the mix.[4] One meleiro-turned-beekeeper, Rogério, told me that his eye was once swollen shut for days after a honey forage. When asked why he would put himself in that danger to retrieve honey, he replied that mainly it was out of necessity—honey was a key food source for his family. At the same time, he simply liked honey and the act of foraging. Honey was a nutritional staple for all the former meleiros I spoke with, while some also noted that they would sell extra honey, and sometimes wax, for a small profit. Today, beekeepers harvest honey primarily for profit, honey no longer playing the vital subsistence role it did in the past.
Reminiscing about his experience as a meleiro, Rogério noted that he never really considered the dangers and environmental consequences associated with honey foraging. Without access to or knowledge of bee suits, for example, the use of protective wear to forage never crossed his mind. Nor did he realize the destruction of the local ecosystem he contributed to as a meleiro. Entire trees were often cut down, sacrificed for a single hive. Other times the entire hive was removed, preventing the bees from continuing to live and thrive in the home they had established. For Rogério and other meleiros, greater awareness of the environmental impact of their foraging practices was developed through their transition from meleiro to apicultor (apiarist or beekeeper). Yet some former meleiros explained that they eventually began to cut out only part of the beehive to preserve the colony’s integrity, illustrating how the introduction of beekeeping was not required for all meleiros to develop greater environmental awareness.
Bee-Beekeeper Entanglements
Beekeeping arrived at the federal settlement where Rogério lives in 2004 in the form of a government-sponsored project through the Dom Helder Câmará Project (PDHC).[5] Through PDHC, and as a collective, Rogério and other community members received initial bee boxes (a demonstration unit), a honey house, bee suits, and technical assistance. The beekeeping project, in conjunction with increased access to other food sources and cash through government programs, helped shift the focus of honey collecting for Rogério from primarily subsistence to profit-gaining. At the same time, his experience as a beekeeper has greatly changed Rogério’s understanding of his role as a member of his environment: “It is not just about profit, but rather also thinking about life. It is a story of preserving nature—in reality, the soil, the environment more generally, and additionally, considering all of the tasks and precautions one must take. You are not producing only for yourself, but also to sell to others.” While “the market” permeates the motivation to take greater care in honey production as a beekeeper, Rogério feels that this responsibility to care for the environment is primarily in service towards the mutual flourishing of both humans and bees.
Most of my interviewees observed that they feel greater accountability to the bees as a beekeeper than as a meleiro. From a posthumanist perspective, beekeepers are “interspecies practitioners”—rather than “intensive livestock farmers”—entering in decentered encounters and relations based on trust with the colonies of bees they tend to (Nimmo, 2015a: 193). The act of beekeeping is literally that, the art of keeping bees—keeping bees content to maintain their hives in the wooden bee boxes created to house a colony and promote honey production. In large part, this entails helping to ensure bees have the nutritional resources needed to survive. During a good rainy season, the flowering trees of the Caatinga landscape (the “pasture,” as Chico Filho called it) provide the pollen and nectar needed for bees to produce enough food for themselves and extra honey, which becomes the honey collected by beekeepers. Honey harvesting typically occurs throughout the rainy season and early dry season. As the dry season progresses, beekeepers make decisions of how to respond to the bee-companions’ diminishing access to flowers and therefore nutrients.
A local beekeeper checks one of his bee boxes with the help of an extension officer in Quixeramobim, Ceará. (Photo: Author)
This care is essential, as a bee colony will abandon their box in times of scarcity (e.g., during the dry season, when potential pollen sources become more distant) in search of a source of nutrients to survive. A common strategy for beekeepers during the dry season is to provide hives with simple syrup made of water mixed with sugar as supplemental nutrition. While this keeps bees in their hives, the “honey” produced is not truly honey but rather more viscous simple syrup, which beekeepers do not harvest to sell. Recently, some beekeepers have transitioned from this artificial food source to either providing the bees with honey from the previous harvesting season or to promoting the flowering of a particular tree, the jurema preta (Mimosa tenuiflora), through irrigation. This practice was developed by an expert beekeeper, professor, and doctor in apiculture from Limoeiro do Norte, Ceará. Keeping bees also involves beekeepers’ collaboration in protecting the hives from possible invaders, including ants. The construction of the beehive stand, as well as adjusting the size of the hole through which bees leave and enter the hive depending on the season, are two safeguards that beekeepers practice: during the dry season, when colonies are weaker, beekeepers also assist their bee-companions in protecting the hive by decreasing the diameter of the hole through which bees leave and enter the hive.
The Collective Agency of Bees
Despite beekeepers’ efforts to regulate the bees that reside in their apiaries, bees maintain a collective agency that transcends the boxes that house their hives. Many of the beekeepers I spoke with had a tendency to talk about “a abelha” (“the bee”), referring to the queen bee. Yet, the queen bee and her colony act as a collective that goes beyond modern understandings of the individual to maintain a thriving hive (Nimmo, 2015b; Preston, 2006). The bee (colony) that occupies a bee box is also not stagnant. Rather, a queen bee may depart a box with some or all of her colony when the colony is becoming too populous or, as mentioned above, when resources are scarce. In the case of the former, a portion of the colony stays behind and a new queen bee is raised. Beekeepers in Ceará have learned to take advantage of the mobility of bee colonies through the process of multiplication, during which part of the colony is extracted and placed into a new bee box, to promote the raising of a new queen bee, while the original queen bee continues to preside over the other section of the divided colony. Transitioning from meleiro to beekeeper, many rural dwellers in the Cearense sertão have become more intentional in how they care for the local environment and maintain “the pasture” for the bees who produce the honey they harvest. Ultimately, though, and unlike cattle more readily confined in pasture lands, bees are able to decide whether to continue to collaborate—to reside in the bee box kept for them—or whether to opt out of the arrangement with the beekeeper.
Notes
[1] Fazenda Normal is a 1,507-hectare farm owned and managed by the State Technical Assistance and Rural Extension Service (EMATERCE) to support research and training related to agriculture, livestock, and beekeeping in the interior of Ceará, Brazil. While the apiaries on Fazenda Normal are primarily for educational purposes, the honey produced is harvested and sold. Chico Filho also maintains a private apiary near his home in a neighboring municipality and produces wax.
[2] None of the beekeepers whom I met in 2024 who had practiced honey foraging in the past continued the practice but rather exclusively practiced beekeeping. In total, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 current beekeepers in Quixeramobim and Choró, Ceará, 16 of whom were formally meleiros. In addition, informal interviews were conducted with other beekeepers, many of whom practiced honey foraging in the past, during apiary visits and honey harvests.
[3] Several of the beekeepers with whom I conversed, many of whom were once meleiros, observed that since the 1980s the populations of wild meliponines had drastically decreased. Also noting the probable impact of the introduction of agrochemicals on meliponin populations, several beekeepers stressed the role that habitat loss through deforestation played on effectively wiping out wild meliponines. A beekeeper working as an extension officer for the National Service for Rural Learning (SENAR) explained that the habitat of meliponines is much more limited than that of Africanized bees, the former preferring tree hollows and the latter willing to build a hive almost anywhere (personal correspondence, July 17, 2024).
[4] Several meleiros said that they sometimes used urine to remove the sticky honey from their hands as they foraged hives. If carrying out the extraction process in the forest, this residue also could make it into the honey solution.
[5] Launched in 2002 by the Ministry of Agricultural Development, PDHC formed part of the federal government’s strategy to reduce extreme poverty in rural areas by supporting family farmers to increase production and gain useful knowledge and skills (Morais et al., 2017).
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the beekeepers with whom I work in Ceará for sharing their insights, experiences, and honey. Additionally, thank you to Alex Rewegan for the insightful feedback.
References
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Morais, J. A. d., & Callou, A. B. F. (2017). Metodologias participativas e desenvolvimento local: a experiência do Projeto Dom Hélder Câmara no assentamento Moacir Lucena*. Interações (Campo Grande), 18.
Nimmo, Richie. (2015a). Apiculture in the Anthropocene: Between Posthumanism and Critical Animal Studies. In H. A.R. N. Editorial Collective (Ed.), Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-human Futures (pp.177-199). Sydney University Press.
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