Miracle honey

They come in many colors: golden, solid onyx, or striped dandelion and cinnamon. Their eyes can be beady black, slate gray, or even bluish-green. Their bodies may be as small as lentils or big as grapes. But the most amazing thing about stingless bees are the honeys they produce, which are increasingly being sought after for food and medicine.

In the Peruvian Amazon, people are just beginning to raise a few of the area’s 175 different species of stingless bees, which promise to help beekeepers and their communities. Historically, such honey has typically been harvested from the wild, which destroys the hives.

But in the last few years, scientists including Cesar Delgado, with the Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP), are teaching people to raise and keep the insects in sustainable ways.

Biochemist and National Geographic Explorer Rosa Vásquez Espinoza is partnering with Delgado and colleagues to better understand the bees, what they pollinate, and the biochemical contents of their medicinal honey. Besides being fascinated by the insects themselves and their products, she wants to help champion stingless beekeeping because of all the benefits the bees bring to communities that raise them—many of which have been hard hit by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“Stingless bees are bringing life back to the Amazon,” Espinoza says, by providing medicinal honey, income, and pollination benefits to a region in need of help.  There is a long and rich history of using honeys as medicine, especially in ancient times. Some records show that people have used honey as a balm, an inebriant, a psychoactive substance, or as a poison. Multiple contemporary studies suggest that honeys from honeybees and stingless bees have antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and wound-healing properties. Stingless bees make honey with chemicals that ward off microbial and fungal growth, an adaptation to keep the substance from spoiling in the tropics. Given the wide variety of plant biodiversity in the Amazon, and the incredible range of botanical chemicals the bees mix into their honeys and wax, it’s also no surprise it has medicinal value. Indeed, some call such honey a “miracle liquid.” Already, people in the tropics use several types of stingless bee honeys and wax from their hives to treat upper respiratory infections, skin conditions, gastrointestinal problems, and even to treat diabetes and cancer. Though research has begun providing a hint of support for some of these uses, much of it is still preliminary. More investigations into the honeys’ medicinal benefits is urgently needed, says David Roubik, an expert on stingless bees at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

“We use the honey for food and medicine,” says Heriberto Vela Córdova, a beekeeper in San Francisco, Peru, who is part of the Kukama-Kukamiria Indigenous community. “For food we use it with coffee, bread. For medicine we use it for bronchitis, pneumonia, burns, skin cuts, colds, arthritis.”

For thousands of years, Indigenous peoples throughout the New World tropics have harvested honey from dozens of stingless bee species, also known as meliponine bees. These social insect form colonies with a queen and many workers. As the name implies, these insects cannot sting, and are thus less dangerous to raise than, say, European honeybees, which are not native to the New World. Many meliponine bees can, however, inflict painful bites with their mandibles.

In Brazil, meliponiculture is widespread, increasingly sophisticated, and popular, but in Peru, the practice is beginning to develop and expand, says Breno Freitas, a researcher at Universidade Federal do Ceará in Brazil.

Nationalgeographic