He is a biologist, an entomologist working at the EMBRAPA environment, a research institute dedicated to the sustainable development of Brazilian agriculture.

His expertise lies in the biology and management of stingless bees.

His research focuses on colony multiplication technologies and the use of native bees for crop pollination.

He is also actively involved in public policies for bee conservation and the sustainable growth of the meliponiculture industry.

So hopefully you guys will be able to say the word meliponiculture by the end of this presentation and use it when you talk about things that you've learned.

So with that, Cristiano, thanks so much for being here today, and I'm gonna let you take over.

- Thank you very much, Robyn.

Thank you, Margarita, for inviting me for this talk.

It's a great pleasure to share with you what we are doing with the native Brazilian stingless bees.

Hi, ladies and gentlemen.

My name is Cristiano Menezes from Brazil.

I am recording this talk because the previous one, which we recorded live, was not good enough because my internet connection was unstable.

So I will record this video to replace the previous one and keep higher quality of audio and video.

And I hope you enjoy this talk where I will show the meliponiculture in Brazil, which is the beekeeping activity with stingless bees, the native bees from Brazil.

I will show the perspectives and the current status of this activity in Brazil.

Hope you enjoy.

I work for EMBRAPA, and this is a research institution in Brazil, which has different set-ups spread in all Brazil, more than 43 different units.

But I am based currently at Sao Paulo state, but I worked there for a long time, also in Amazon.

So the information I will bring come from north to south of Brazil, where I will give a very broad idea of the activity here.

I worked with bees, with stingless bees for more than 20 years.

And the first time I opened a hive, I was really impressed with the beauty and the great potential of these bees.

Their honey was amazing, their properties, the smell, their behavior.

It's a real feather for us to study, to understand, with many mysteries to be studied and solved.

Interesting biology, very different from the other bees we know around the world, and very diverse.

It's differently from honeybees and bumblebees.

Each stingless bee species has a different behavior, a different nest architecture, and many nice histories to tell and to understand.

But they're also very important for Brazilians and for people in general.

They can provide very interesting products and services.

So I decided, at that time to work, with them to understand better their biology, but most important, to develop products from our biodiversity that can generate profit for Brazil, improve people's life, generating incomes for them, and mostly an activity that is really sustainable and can generate benefits from our nature without destroying it.

So that was my expectations when I started.

And I am very happy to share with you what is going on in Brazil nowadays, which I understand that is a great change and a great opportunity for all the tropical countries which have these species in their own countries.

So as I said, stingless bees is a group of bees which are eusocial like honeybees.

They also produce lots of food.

There are some species that are really productive, and they can make huge populations.

Their nest can have up to 50,000 bees, depending on the species, but they are very useful for many purpose.

Brazil has the greatest biodiversity in the world.

It's half of the known biodiversity of stingless bees in the world.

We believe we have about 550 different species around the world.

We have 250 and about 90 that we are already know that they're new, but they are being described by the specialists.

So we have a great biodiversities, but of course, not all of them are interesting for human purpose, for honey production or other products.

We have about about 50 to 60 different species which are being used for stingless beekeeping and especially for honey production, but for many other purpose, as I will show further in my talk.

But we have many different species that are being kept and we don't need to go to nature to bring nests anymore.

We can increase the activity in a sustainable way just by splitting their nests and multiplying the nest that we already have at beekeeping activity.

So this is a great advantage of these activity that we don't rely on natural resource to increase the activity anymore.

We can just split the nest, and that's fine.

The honey is the most important product that we have from stingless bees.

Each species will produce a unique honey.

And that's the great difference between stingless beekeeping and honeybee beekeeping.

People can say, ah, but they don't produce as much as honeybees, as Apis mellifera.

But on the other hand, they produce unique flavors, unique honey that honeybees cannot produce.

So each stingless bees has a a different value and the different price in their honey.

Generally, these honeys showed by 10 times more in terms of price than honeybee honey.

And we have some specific honeys that are soft, gentle, sweet, and delicate, but others are very strong with a lot of personality and strong flavors, some very acid, like vinegar.

Others, some weird honey.

We have one, for example, that smells like cheese, and there is a great variety.

Some of them smell like lemon.

We have a huge variety, and this is the great potential not to produce a huge volume of honey, but very special honey with aggregated value on it because of the difference.

And where the difference comes from, it's because of the way they store their honey.

While honeybees rely in dehydration, they dehydrate the honey with high concentration of sugars where bacteria cannot ferment it.

So generally honeybee honey has more than 80% of sugar content.

And with this concentration, the microorganisms living in there cannot ferment.

And this is one part, but the other part is because their honeycombs are made with pure wax, wax which workers produce from their glands, from their abdominal glands.

And the the wax of honeybees do not has a lot of flavor.

So the honey of honeybees stays stable for a very long time with the floral aromas in it without changing much with time.

And that's the key difference with stingless bee honey.

Stingless bee honey are alive.

When they store it, it has a lot of smells from the flowers, and it's generally more liquid.

And when it's very fresh, it looks like you are biting a flower because the flower aromas are intense.

But what is the biggest difference from honeybee to stingless bees is because they store their nectar in these pots which are made of wax plus plant resins, the properties which they acquire from the environment.

So it works like a oak barrel for wines.

With time, this structure, this material, which we call cerumen, will give different aromas, different properties, different substances to the honey, and it will change completely in terms of flavor, and it will get the identity of the bee that produced these honey.

So with time, the identity of the bee, the smell of the bee will replace the flower aromas, and it will change with time for this first aspect, the properties of inside these spots that will go to the honey.

But the second flavor, and maybe the most important, is the fermentation.

Because distinguished bees live in tropical environment, which is very humid, and inside three trunks, it's hard for them to remove too much water from the nectar like honeybees do.

So because of that, they developed a new strategy to store their food.

They ferment it.

They have specialized microbiome of bacteria, yeasts, and some fungi that will ferment this honey.

Most important, fermentation is the alcoholic one, and later, the acetic one.

But there are many complex systems.

And the more interesting part is that we don't know almost nothing about this process.

So this is a huge area that can be now exploited, is, what's going on with this honey?

And there is a big chance for us to find important solutions for humans to store our own food and also to understand where the medical properties of these values product comes from, and bacteria may be involved in this process.

So these are the two systems that are very different in stingless bees.

First, the maturation inside cerumen pots, and second, the fermentation.

That's why our honey is unique and wonderful.

But we have many other possibilities for stingless bees.

We have some species that produce a lot of pollen that is still underexplored as well.

Many species produce a lot of properties.

We have an example here, Melipona quadrifasciata, which I always joke, if they produced honey instead of propolis, they would be the most productive bee in the world.

But they do store a lot of properties, like you are seeing in this slide.

So we have many different species that can be exploited for these reasons.

And there are new studies showing interesting medical properties of stingless bees, very recent findings, strong possibilities for medical properties and for their benefits for our health.

Stingless bees are also being used for crop pollination.

We have many crops in Brazil already using them, like strawberries, which use jatai, a very common stingless bee species in Brazil.

And when they visit the the flowers of strawberries, they increase the size of the fruit, and they also help to increase the shelf life of these fruits, comparing the well-pollinated fruit with the non-pollinated fruit.

So they're being very used for strawberries and coffee pollination.

I will show more details later in my talk.

And they not only increase productivity, but also increase the quality of the coffee, the quality of the coffee beans that are being produced.

We have a very recent study with acai berry in Amazon region where we found that the tiny stingless bees are the ones important for acai production.

And it's interesting to mention this case because, before, people didn't care for the tiny bees because they don't produce much honey.

But nowadays that they know that they're for acai berries, they're not only helping to conserve these species, but they are now managing the stingless bees, the small and tiny stingless bees for acai pollination, helping to conserve forest around the acai crops and also to increase their productivity.

We have now in Brazil more than 30 crops that we already know that stingless bees are important and are contributing for production in agriculture in general.

And in the acai case, we found that this important fruit for Amazon people rely in more than 90% in their production.

And we found that conserving nature around the crops of acai is more important than managing bees for acai pollination.

So this crop is really contributing for forest conservation in acai area of production.

Stingless bees are also being used for environmental education.

Because these bees don't sting, children can manage these hives and see them inside, try their products and provide great experience.

We have many interesting initiatives nowadays in Brazil with this.

We show in more details, this one that is kept by my wife, Isabela.

She has this this project where she has a minivan that takes the bees and other science areas for children, and the bees are the most successful one.

Children can see the hive inside, understand their behavior, how they build their nest, their importance.

They understand about their job for pollination and for providing food for humanity.

And in the end of the class, they have an experience where we can open a hive, harvest the honey with them, they can try the honey directly from, straight from the hive.

And because they don't sting, they can put these bees at their hands and have all these experience that will change their life.

And after the classic takeout away for their home, a trap nest where they can attract their own nest of stingless bee, especially jatai, which are very common, even in urban environments, so they can establish their own beekeeping activity at their home.

And we have a feedback of many children that experienced this class with us and later was able to to have their own hive.

And this involve all their parents and their family in this activity.

We have taken these examples for many big experience and big expositions, like this one you were seeing.

This is a big exposition in Brazil, which occurs in Holambra.

It's an exposition, it's a garden show where more than 300,000 people visit and see how the bees can interact with their gardens.

And many people now are learning about their importance in taking their home.

We have visited many different cities in Sao Paulo state, mainly where we are based, but we have also taken this initiative for other states as well.

So we are covering nowadays a great area of Brazil with this initiative.

Another business that is happening with stingless bees in Brazil is the hobby activity, people that are keeping bees for fun.

They keep these bees as pets in their homes, like this example that you are seeing from Fernando Scavasin.

He is a person who keeps about 50 different, 50 hives in his apartment, and he lives in the center of the city of Sao Paulo in the 50th floor at his balcony.

So this is a great example of these people that are keeping bees for fun, for their own honey production, or also to have this feeling that they are helping nature and contributing with bees conservation and pollination.

And even in Sao Paulo, he was able to produce his own honey in the 50th floor.

So this is the great example of how interesting this activity can be to make people more aware about the environmental aspects of the world and bees' importance and making people involved with this activity and give value to environmental issues.

Because of these activities growing a lot in this direction, there are many people nowadays keeping bees for economic purposes.

So they are keeping these nests at their home or at their farms and multiplying the nest to sell the daughter colonies for this public that is growing a lot.

So stingless bee activity nowadays relies a lot in the sales of new hives for these people that are starting their own activity in their homes.

So this is, nowadays, most of beekeepers in south and southeast Brazil are investing more in this area than in honey production itself.

So it's a recent change that is going on in this activity, and many people innovating, building new different styles of hives where people can keep in their garden and, besides the honey, can bring a beauty to their gardens and also contributing for this species conservation.

And as you see here, 2-year-old children can harvest the honey, and I'm sure these children who has contact with these insects since they are very young will have a completely different view of the environmental purposes of the environmental conservation.

We have been working for the last 10 years with an association in Brazil called ABELHA, where its mission is to deviate and spread information about bees not only to the beekeepers and farmers, but mainly to the general public, to the people, general people that can be interested by it.

We developed many interesting products to attract the intention of people for the bees' importance, like small videos like these, the videocasts where we share basic information, interesting information, how they behave, their bizarre cases, bees that eat meat, for example, and how they store their food, and where the honey comes from and how do they produce it.

So many interesting information, and the audience has been huge.

In each video that we launched like this in a few weeks, we have more than 100,000 people watching it and getting interested by these materials.

We have also invested a lot of time and effort to help the news, to help journalists to produce better materials with information based on science about the situation of the bees and the needs of conservation and why they're struggling and what can we do to help to conserve these species.

So we have invested a lot of energy to share information with people.

And we first started with different magazines, but nowadays, we reached a very nice status in TV shows.

These are one of the examples where we visited big TV shows, showing this information for millions and millions of people in Brazil.

One of the examples is Ana Maria Braga program, which you are seeing at the left of this slide, where it's one of the most popular TV shows in Brazil.

And this is cause and consequence.

We were invited to show bees in these programs.

And on the other hand, we create new business, new demands, and more people get interested for this activity.

So we have seen a boom in this activity in the last year, especially after COVID pandemics.

We have reached many, many different programs in Brazil, and here are some examples of the biggest and most important TV shows that we reached with technical and interesting information about bees.

And during the the COVID pandemics, we launched a beekeeping course.

So we saw that many people were reaching us and asking for information.

So we decided to launch an online course where people could learn the basic specs of stingless beekeeping.

And we had more than 65,000 people watching these courses.

And after the first trials, we saw that 80% of the public were not farmers, were not beekeepers, but were people living in cities and that wanted to keep bees at their home, as I said before.

So we launched another course that is focused in urban environment and helping people to keep these bees in a safe way, in a correct way using the right species.

And we had more than 15,000 people watching it.

And in the last year, we launched a specific one, this for farmers to show them the importance of bees for pollination purposes.

And more than 2,000 people already watched this course and, in these cases, more technical course to teach people how to keep bees and use them for crop pollination.

And crop pollination is what we believe will be the most important business for stingless bee.

And we are very excited about it because, because of this interaction with with agriculture, we can have multiple benefits of this activity, as I will show now.

So we have taken stingless bees to test the importance for crop pollination for coffee pollination.

Coffee pollination is not a new business, it's not a new information.

It's been studied for a very long time, but so far most farmers are not aware about bees' importance.

And although we have a lots of scientific information, the activity is still the same.

They are not changing the way they produce coffee.

So why?

Because we still have a lot of doubts in terms of managing the bees and managing the landscape and see what can happen.

We don't have any doubts that coffee needs bees.

So when we have more bees, we have more diversity, we increase pollination.

But most of studies compared bagged flowers with open pollination, or they compared areas with high diversity, with areas with low diverse of bees and saw that they were important.

But there is still a question that we didn't have an answer.

That is, what would happen if I put more bees in the coffee field?

So we already knew that without bees, production would reduce.

And with the bees we already have in nature, it is a good production.

But what happen if I had more bees than I have in nature?

So this question was not answered before, and we are working in a publication that will show for you all these results.

And so what we saw is when we increase the amount of bees in the field, we increased the production.

So this is how we tested it.

We got coffee field.

We put bees in the side in this farm and compared the production close to the bees, 50 meters from from the hives, and far from the bees, about 300 meters from the bees.

And we saw a great difference between these two areas.

Using honeybees for pollination, we found an increase of 16% in productivity.

So we tested this in about 17 farms, and we saw a constant and important change in the production and in the quality of this coffee.

And we also tested with stingless bees, although it was in a smaller number of areas, we also found a very positive effect of stingless bees in coffee production.

And in case of coffee, both honeybees and stingless bees are important for pollination of this crop.

And more than increasing the productivity, bees, in general, they not only increase the productivity, but they help to improve the quality of the coffee, of the coffee drink.

So close to the bees, the coffee score was much higher than the coffee produced far from the bees, as you see in this slide.

And also, the price of the coffee bag increased by 13% close to the bees, comparing to the coffee produced far from the bees.

Although it was not significant, and we believe it was not significant because we didn't have many replication in this study, we only tested these in six different farms, we had a positive effect in the size of the coffee beans.

We diminished the amount of peaberries that are produced by non-pollinated flowers or self-pollinated flowers, and we diminished the caffeine amount in the seeds.

And the caffeine, for who doesn't know, the caffeine is responsible for the bitter flavor of coffee drink.

So diminishing it is related to high-quality coffees.

We don't know exactly what caused this diminishment of caffeine content, but this may be one of the reasons for having coffees with higher score in our experiment.

So this is great potential.

We have more than 2 million hectares of coffee in Brazil, and we believe when farmers understand the importance of the bees, this will not only open great opportunities for crop pollination, but also for the other part of the activities in stingless beekeeping.

And why we are so excited, because there is a great change happening in pollination area nowadays.

So before, what we did, we had a crop that needed bees.

We would put all these hives in trucks and carry the hives to the farm.

And we would leave them there during the blooming period and then removing the hives for another crop or for honey production, for example.

And this was the main way we did pollination in the past, but this is changing, why?

Because we saw that this activity, although it was beneficial for pollination and for farmers, it also brought environmental problems with spread of diseases, spread of species that are invasive species around the world.

So this activity, the way it was done also brought environmental problems.

So there is a more modern way of seeing crop pollination, which we believe will become more and more relevant in agriculture.

So as I said before, we only looked at managing honeybees for looking at pollination.

Later, we had other species being added, like bumblebees, the solitary mason bees.

But there is more that the farmers must do to have good pollination.

So besides the manage the bees, we must also rely on wild bees.

So there are many studies showing that wild bees are the most important pollinators in many crops, and we need to rely on them as well to have good pollination.

And to have them, there is only one way.

We must improve the landscape and the habitats around the crops to have these wild bees healthier.

But to make this happen, we must also adjust and improve our practices in agriculture, the techniques we use, to make an environment that is more favorable for bees.

And of course, we must take care about how we use chemical pesticides and how to diminish the impacts that we are bringing for pollinators.

So this is what we call the integrated crop pollination.

And this publication that you are seeing is the first one I saw.

I don't know if it was exactly the first one ever, but after this, I saw many other publications coming out.

So since 2017, this is becoming, each day, more stronger, and for sure, we will change the way we look at pollination in the farms, and we will open great opportunity for beekeeping and also to improve sustainability of agriculture.

Because of these new ideas, we are developing a tool in Brazil that is being called, so far, APOIA Pollination.

May change the name in the future, but for now, we are calling this.

And our aim is to build a set of practices and a management tool that will help the farmers to transform their farms in an environment that is favorable for bees, that is friendly for the bees.

And so this is to help farmers that want to change.

This tool is to help them to do this and then to measure the impact they are bringing and even increase their profitability.

It's based in four different axles.

The first three ones are management axle, and the fourth is how they can measure the impact.

So basically, it's how they manage the landscape, how they they can manage pollinators, how they can manage the inputs to avoid killing the bees.

And later, the last one is how to measure the positive impacts of the first three axles.

The first one that is the landscape management is in a level of information of, how can the farm improve the quality of the landscape, keeping its productivity, keeping its production, but helping the bees?

So how can he use, for example, the conservation areas, how he can create ecological corridors to help pollinators?

Areas that are not used in the farm, how can he transform these areas into a source of food and places for them to build their nest?

How they can improve this area?

There are many possibilities for the farmer to achieve this.

He can restore natural areas, as you are seeing here.

He can plant specific areas for the bees and leaving natural habitats for them to make their nests in the soil and to use these flowers for food.

And many times, we are not saying that farmers should diminish their production.

That's the opposite.

This is an example that I brought from Lucas Garibaldi in Argentina where farmers didn't plant in these curves, leaving this area with natural spontaneous plants to come up and provide food and place for them to nest.

And by doing this, the farmer increase its productivity by 21%.

So he diminished the area, but he increases productivity and diminished his production costs.

So this is amazing and bringing new possibilities for the farmers.

And this is also from Lucas Garibaldi.

He shows that we don't need to give the best areas, production areas for these natural habitats.

We can select the worst areas of the farms for production to leave these areas to replace by natural habitats.

So in this example, what he calls pixel farming, we look at the productivity of our farm.

We leave the best areas for agriculture, and the worst ones, we leave them for the wild areas, for the wild bees, for the wild plants.

And with this, we increase the overall productivity.

So we diminish the planted area, but we increase the overall productivity and profitability of the farm.

And this is another example of areas that we generally don't use in a smart way.

At the farm, we put generally dead fences around our farm.

So instead of dead fences, we can use live plants that will provide food for the bees, and we can plant trees or shrubs that are better that provides a lot of nectar, for example.

And besides the agriculture, we can produce honey from the fences of these farms, which can be a new source of income for the farmer.

Besides the landscape management, we can also manage pollinators.

So we are not saying that we cannot rent hives or use beekeeping for pollination.

That's the opposite.

We have this tool as a possibility.

And for many crops, this is essential.

For example, for coffee crop, where we have millions and millions of flowers in a very short period, we will probably need to rent hives to have good pollination.

But besides renting hives, we can also establish the beekeeping activity at their property and add value to it by producing other products like propolis, honey, and other products from bees in general.

And we can also increase the natural population using the bee hotels, which I will show in the next slide.

So beekeeping activity can be integrated to these crops as well as stingless beekeeping.

And by doing that, we not only have the economic impact by generating a new product at the the farm, that is the honey or other products, but we can also involve the local people in this activity, traditional people, we can involve women.

We can generate social benefits by increasing these activity at these farms.

So can you imagine, we have 2 million hectares of coffee farms in Brazil.

If we use all these areas to stimulate beekeeping in these areas, how big can stingless beekeeping in Brazil can be?

So just for you to have an idea of the size of this activity, if we have about 2 million hectares of coffee, we would need about 15 million colonies of stingless bees to pollinate all these coffee area.

Can you imagine the size that this activity can become in the future by pollinating the coffee and also producing honey in this area?

So these can become a very, very big activity in Brazil.

And besides the beekeeping activities, we can also increase diversity and abundance of solitary bees by spreading bee hotels, which are these structures where solitary bees will make their nest.

And by doing this, we increase not only abundance of these solitary bees but also their diversity.

But it doesn't help anything if I do everything right in the first two axles and use a chemical pesticide that is not compatible with bees.

So it will be very important for the farmer to look at the way he control his pests in his crop to make it compatible with bees in this area.

So this is an axle where we call input management, where we look at the chemicals that he will need or can need, and there are many solutions for this.

We can replace chemicals that are incompatible with chemicals that represents less risk for the bees, especially by biological control products that can be used.

But we can also adjust the application methods there.

We can adjust the timing that we apply these chemicals to avoid killing the bees, for example, by not applying previous to the blooming or during the blooming.

So we can organize the applications to do in better moments to avoid killing the bees.

Or for example, using different application methods to diminish the risk to the bees.

So it doesn't help anything if I don't think about how we will control pests and disease without killing the bees.

And I will bring some examples of this to show to farmers that this is possible, and people that produce tomatoes in Europe already learned about this with bumblebee example.

So when they started using bumblebees for tomato pollination, they looked at this and said we cannot apply chemicals as we did before.

We must change it. And how can we change it?

So we need information.

Here is one information that tomato producers receive when they buy colonies of bumblebees.

We have here, at the left, the chemical active ingredient that he can use for pest control, the commercial name of this product, and the effect on the bumblebees.

So we have these symbols where show if this product is incompatible or if it is compatible, and the persistence of this chemical at the environment.

So with this information, the farmer is able to program his pest control according to the presence of the bees.

So if he has a product, for example, like this first one that is incompatible with the bees and the effect lasts for 15 days, he can replace this product by another one that has the same effect for similar effect, but the persistence is much smaller or that is compatible with the bees.

We have, nowadays, these very nice apps that helps farmers to find these information.

So Koppert has an app, a free app that can be used, and also Biobest, are two that I know that are very interesting there.

We have information about the impact of specific pesticides on bees and other biological control agents.

And this is the first step to have this information available for the farmers to take good decisions.

But another thing is that the chemical itself may represent a risk for bees, but depending on the way you use the same chemical, you may or may not have impact on bees.

So one chemical that may be incompatible if applied by plane, for example, may be compatible if applied by drench, which is applied at the trunk of the plant, or if it's applied at the seed during the seed treatment.

So the same chemical that can represent a risk with a specific application method, in another method, it may harmless to the bees.

So we are not saying that farmers cannot use chemicals.

We are saying that they need to look at the way they use chemicals to diminish the impact on pollinators, and he will profit with this.

So our idea, in general, is that the bee will stimulate farmers to become more conscious and use chemical in a smarter way.

The last part of this activity is the production and commercialization.

This is the monitoring, how the farmer will monitor the impact of all these change in his farm.

We want him to look at productivity indexes, the quality indexes, and the commercialization indicators.

So for example, is he achieving new seals, new standards, new markets with all these change?

Is he increasing profitability, productivity, quality?

Anyway, this is how the farmer will measure, especially the economic impact, of all these change.

And we are also wanting to look at the social indicators and how these contributed to increase the quality of the employment and the income of people around the farm.

And of course, we also expect this to improve the environmental indicators, how all these change increased biodiversity and contributed to conservation of this landscape.

So this is how we expect the farmer to monitor the impact of this change in his farm.

So our idea now is that these two, we work in three steps.

So first, we will go to his farm and make a diagnosis.

So how do you produce coffee?

We will ask all the information from this farm in all these four axis, and see, how is the farm nowadays?

And we will have a very precise diagnosis showing, for example, in the axle one, in the landscape axle, maybe he's doing everything right, but in the axle two, more or less, and in this example, in the axle three, he's doing everything wrong.

And so with this diagnosis, we will give him information about what he will need to do to improve his farm to make it more friendly to the bees.

So we will provide useful information to help him to take these decisions and with very objective recommendations of what he can do to improve his farm.

And the third and last part is the results phase, where based on specific indicators, we will see how these change are impacting profitability, the social aspects, and the environmental aspects.

And with this, we believe the farmer will be able to make more profit because bees is a precise indicator of sustainability, is the best indicator of sustainability ever.

And he can also profit by using it in marketing activities and increase profitability of his farm and the general sustainability of his farm.

With all this, we believe stingless beekeeping has a great future to grow, and it will help to make agriculture more sustainable, more relevant to the society, bringing benefits for biodiverse conservation, will help to make food production more resilient to these climate change that we are seeing, and will generate benefits for the people and important products to the road.

And we believe, if we want to conserve nature, if we want Amazon Forest, for example to be conserve, we must generate these possibilities to help people to generate income, to have interesting products from the forest, together with the forest.

If not, they will just cut the forest and plant something on it.

So we believe we have a great future with stingless beekeeping, and this has great potential for the future in Brazil.

I thank you all for the attention.

I am available for you if we have have any question.

It will be a great pleasure to answer.

This is my email, contact. You can contact me at any time.

Thank you very much for your attention, and I am looking forward for next opportunities for us to chat about this.

And I hope in 10 or 20 years, I repeat this presentation, showing the results of this beautiful thing that we are doing now with pollination in Brazil and share with you good news about biodiverse conservation, social impact, and economic impact based on Brazilian agriculture, which is one of the most important activities that we have in Brazil.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Thank you for inviting me for this talk.

It was great pleasure to share with you what we are doing now in Brazil, thank you.

- Okay, so there's quite a few questions for you.

I'm wondering if you would mind, can you describe sort of the life history of stingless bees?

Like, are they social organisms with one queen, even if you compare them to honeybees?

- Yeah, sorry, not bringing all this subject there in the talk.

But yes, they're eusocial bees.

Like honeybees, they have a single queen in the nest.

And most species, we have a few exceptions, but most species, we have a single queen, which mates with a single male in most species.

We have some species with very small colonies, a few dozen worker bees, and others that are giant colonies with many, many thousands, like Trigona spinipes, much bigger than honeybee colonies.

But in general, they have a very similar biology to honeybees in terms of social organization, although with many eccentric behaviors, bizarre behaviors.

We have bees that spit acids to defend their nests and burn our skin.

We have others that are very shy and just hide when we open the nest.

Most species are aggressive.

They bite our hair, our ear, our nose and eyes.

So although they don't have sting, they have very good mechanisms for defending their nest, so differently from honeybees.

Their biology is very diverse.

There are many part particularities among the different species.

- Well, that kind of answers, well, I still have more questions.

So I can see why you might wear a veil to keep yourself from being bitten, but then you showed your daughter and said they were nice.

So maybe that's just a difference between species.

- Exactly. So the most common bee in Brazil is jatai.

They live in cities.

They are very adopted to urban environments.

Most of the times, they're very shy and very gentle.

Eventually, when we don't manage them much, they bite us, but it doesn't hurt much.

So we don't need the veil to manage these.

But some species we cannot manage without the veil.

So they're so aggressive and they have different mechanisms for defending.

They glue resins on us.

There is a species in Malaysia that actually cut our hairs.

They call them hair-cutting bees.

And I didn't believe, but after five minutes taking picture of the nest, when I put my my hand on my head, it was full of hairs that were cut by them.

So there are many bizarre behaviors.

And the ones that burn our skins, we call them caga-fogo in Brazil.

They spit acids that actually cause severe burnings in our skin.

- Do you know, is it formic acid?

- It's formic acid, almost 100%, yeah.

- Uh-huh, just like ants, right?

- Just like ants. It's very painful.

I've been attacked once, and I stayed months with mark on my face for a long time.

- Wow, so speaking of acid, the honey that is made by stingless bees, do you know what is preventing the bacterial growth?

And do you know the pH?

- So it's not preventing bacteria growth.

Bacteria is growing, and it's actually the mechanisms to conserve their food for a long time.

So they have symbiotic microbes living with them, fungi, yeasts, and especially bacteria from Bacillus genus that are living together with them.

So they actually ferment, and fermenting is the strategy that they use to protect it.

But the pH is very low, around three and four.

So it's very acid, but varies among species.

Some are sweeter and more delicate.

Others, especially in Malaysia, they're very acidic.

The Malaysian honey is like vinegar.

It's absolutely acid, mainly acetic acid.

But there are other organic acids produced by many different fermentation mechanisms that these microbes have.

But it's important to emphasize that we know almost nothing about the fermentation mechanisms that is going on in their system.

- Huh, so how much honey can you get from one colony, and where can we buy some?

- That's a very good question.

We struggle yet to export stingless bee honey.

There are many regulations that are still being revised.

So there are not many people exporting, so it's very hard to find it in other countries.

But in tropical areas, you can find them, nowadays, in regular market.

This is an advance that was done recently in Brazil.

We made very good regulations and are helping beekeepers to commercialize these honey in the formal market.

Because it's different from honeybee honey, the standards are not adequate for this kind of honey.

The water content is generally higher.

The acidity activity is generally higher.

So we don't meet the protocols that are demanded.

So it's hard to find in the formal market.

For some time, you will need to visit Brazil to try these honeys.

But how much they produce, some species are very productive.

The most productive ones in Brazil will produce, in average, about four kilos of honey per year, the most productive.

It can be more, but on average is four kilos.

But in Malaysia, the species there produce much more.

I can't say exactly the volume.

I struggled to understand what they were meaning of their productivity with it 'cause they were saying a productivity by month, but would be something between eight and 10 kilos of honey per year, in my estimates, if I'm not wrong.

But the species there seems more productive than ours.

But most species do not produce much.

So the jatai example produce 500 grams per year.

Other species, produce 50 grams per year.

So varies a lot according to the species.

- So you talked a lot about pollination.

I found that really interesting.

And can you help me understand, how can pollination affect the flavor of coffee or how much caffeine it has?

- That's a great question, a tricky question and difficult to answer, actually.

We don't have specifically exactly the perfect answer.

We have hypothesis that we are working on it.

The most important hypothesis is that the genetic flow between different individuals among the plants will make more healthier fruits, healthier seeds.

So when you are self-pollinating, you are crossing you with yourself.

So the genetic problems related to this individual will be affected in the fruit.

When we are crossing this pollination, we diminish the chances of this happening.

So we diminish the amounts of peaberries, which has different flavor, for example.

And probably by this genetic crop that we provide, we have these benefits.

But it's still not clear what is the mechanism.

It's also not clear in other crops as well.

So for strawberry where we saw that fruits had a longer shelf life, the researchers who studied this believed it was related to hormones.

But also, it's all hypothesis that remains to be tested.

It's a very recent study area where we are trying to understand, what is the impact of pollination on food quality and these things?

But this is what we have of information right now.

But it's a very interesting subject for research.

- Somebody asked if stingless bees pollinate cacao.

- So far, not. We hope.

Cacao flowers are very tiny and don't have much resource, so bees are generally not interested in cacao flowers.

But we have some very, very tiny bees that are more than the smaller flies you know that may be attracted to these flowers.

If they are managed in these cacao areas and they don't have much more options of food, they may visit cacao, but cacao is is pollinated naturally by tiny flies that lives in cacao environment.

So this is the natural pollinators, but they are hard to manage.

So we hope we can manage the tiny bees for this purpose because this would be a great achievement for stingless beekeepers and for cacao producers.

- Well, maybe something to talk about in the future.

- Yes, hopefully.

- I was really interested in what you were describing as pixel farming.

That sounds like a really amazing concept.

So have the farmers been receptive to the idea of planting, you know, pollinator strips on their worst lands?

Are they doing it?

- Not much. This is the hardest part.

So everything is very beautiful in theory, but when you go to the farm, it's much more complicated, especially for coffee farmers.

The big why, because they can produce coffee bees.

So they hope they don't need bees.

They don't want to depend on bees.

So there is a cultural barrier to break, and that's very hard, and I don't blame them.

It's difficult to change your culture, your tradition, your methods.

And it's expensive to restore an hectare of natural area in Brazil.

It will cost about $3,000 per hectare.

It's expensive and costs money.

So this is a culture change that we must, we believe that our tool will help this change because you don't need to do it in your entire farm.

You can do it in a small part and test, and you can compare yourself the result of this part with the other part.

If it doesn't get more money from that small part, you won't do it in the other part.

But if it does, then he will become convinced.

And if this person can convince other people when he comes with a nice, beautiful brand truck on his farm and the neighbors are looking at him, then this will start growing.

So we believe we are about to have this change.

But the information, they already have.

They already have these pixel farming information.

So most machines, they already registered information while they are harvesting.

So the computer inside these machines are nowadays very sophisticated.

So the farmer would already have the tools to measure it in the field without increasing too much the cost, and it would be viable for him to test it and to have this information.

So we are very optimistic about this in the future.

- Yeah, it's very true here in the US as well.

You have to get some beekeepers to buy in, and then other people will believe them rather than believing the scientists.

- Yes, yes. So we are used to that.

But that's a challenging thing that we must try different things.

I mean, I believe these kind of management tools are very helpful.

- Yeah, so someone asked if honeybees are commonly used in Brazil, and I think the answer is yes.

In fact, in the United States, we get a lot of Brazilian honey, especially organic.

Certified organic honey comes from Brazil.

- Yeah, and very soon, you'll also have the stingless bee honey reaching other countries.

I believe this is, we are in a stage where we don't have too much scale of production, but because of the great interest in these activity that is occurring now in all of the tropical areas, we will have more production in the future and it will reach the international markets.

For Brazilian people, most people have the African honeybee honey.

So this is the biggest production that we have, and still many people don't know or consume stingless bee honey.

So it's changing now.

We have, at the moment, some people that are being able to sell their honey in markets, in formal markets, and it's increasing the interest.

And also another movement that is happening, I didn't mention this during my talk, many chefs of cuisine are using stingless bee honey when they are cooking, and these are becoming famous.

So very popular.

So people are finding it fancy to use these different kind of flavors and honeys and cookings in their meals.

So it's increasing gradually, but we still produce not much of stingless bee.

- If someone were to try to buy some on the internet, do you think it would be real?

- In Brazil, I would say yes.

We can buy them, and it's real.

We have good quality of the internet.

But to send from Brazil to US, it would be complicated.

I think it wouldn't reach because the barriers are big.

It's not easy to export honey because of all the constraints related to disease that can be transmitted and all these things.

There are great barriers that, so far, I don't know any case of anyone that is exporting formally.

It could be in the recent future.

There are some companies that already have the licenses and are searching for international markets at the moment.

So we'll probably have in the future.

- Okay. Well, let's end on that hopeful note.

Thank you so much for a really fun presentation.

We're really glad that you were able to join us, and thank you to the audience for coming today, and maybe you got to see the whole series.

We look forward to another round in 2026.

So thanks, everybody, for coming, and we'll see you.

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Beekeeping Around the World: Stingless Bees in Brazil

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Length 1 hour

Recorded Mar 13, 2025

Dive into the world of stingless bees, key pollinators in tropical regions. This webinar covers their diversity, beekeeping practices, and sustainable management.

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