{
  "id": "abejas-sin-aguijon-de-las-indias",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The stingless bees of the Indies: Mesoamerican beekeeping in the Spanish record",
  "summary": "Oviedo opens his chapter on wasps by apologising that the bees should have come first, then reports that Hispaniola has none and Tierra Firme has many kinds. Landa found the hives already property in Yucatan, with a festival held for the abundance of their honey and a named patron. The bees were stingless Meliponini, kept for millennia; the modern literature dates their collapse not to the conquest but to 1911 and to the 1960s.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "natural-history",
    "agriculture",
    "mesoamerica",
    "yucatan",
    "books",
    "ecology"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "landa-relacion-de-las-cosas-de-yucatan"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "oviedo-historia-general-y-natural-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "columbian-exchange"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "vainilla-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Did the Americas have honey bees before the Spanish arrived?",
    "What did the Spanish chroniclers say about Maya beekeeping?",
    "What are stingless bees and who kept them?",
    "Why did Melipona beekeeping decline in Mexico?",
    "What is xunan kab and where is it recorded?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The first Spanish naturalist of the Indies begins the subject by conceding he has ordered it wrongly. Book XV, chapter III of Oviedo's history is headed \"De las abispas, y calabrones, y moscas, y tabanos, y sus semejantes\", and its first sentence is that \"Mucha raçon fuera que primero que alguna cosa de las que se han dicho en este libro XV, se escribiera de las abejas, pues ques animal tan provechoso e tan notado en el mundo, y de que tanta utilidad se sigue de su fructo, assi como es la miel y la çera, cosas muy nesçessarias e dignas de estimaçion\".",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "What follows is a negative report for one island and a positive one for the mainland, and Oviedo marks the difference himself. \"Pero en esta Isla Española no hay abejas ni las he visto ni he oydo deçir que las haya. En la Tierra-Firme si hay muchas y de muchas maneras e diferençias, assi en el animal e forma de la misma abeja, como en el sabor e color de la miel y en la diferençia de la çera.\" He defers the description to the books on those parts, saying only that what he has seen of it is much. The wasps he then describes on Hispaniola make combs in the trees that are \"ni son de çera ni tienen miel, sino secos\".",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "In Yucatan the hives were already property, and Landa records them in a legal rather than a natural-history context. Listing the injuries the Maya settled by restitution rather than by blood, his account names those who \"eran causa de algun incendio de casas o eredades, de colmenas o trojes de maiz\" - hives standing beside houses, holdings and maize granaries in the same clause.",
      "sources": [
        "landa-relacion-yucatan-paris-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same source records a festival kept for the honey itself. In the month Tzec the keepers gathered in the house that celebrated it and did everything as in the other festivals \"salvo que no derramavan sangre\"; they held the Bacabes for their advocates and especially Hobnil; they gave four plates each with a ball of incense in the middle \"y pintadas a la redonda unas figuras de miel que por la abundancia della era esta fiesta\"; and they closed it with drink, \"y harto porque davan para ello los dueños de las colmenas miel en abundancia\". The phrase \"los dueños de las colmenas\" names hive owners as a standing group.",
      "sources": [
        "landa-relacion-yucatan-paris-1864"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The bees the chroniclers were describing are the Meliponini, the stingless bees, which is why Oviedo could find combs without wax on one island and many kinds of honey and wax on the mainland: Mexico holds 46 species in 11 genera, nearly 26 per cent of them endemic, and Melipona beecheii - xunan kab in Yucatec Maya - is the species of greatest cultural weight in the peninsula. Meliponiculture was practised there before the Spanish arrived, and the Madrid Codex carries scenes of the Maya tending the bees and their reproduction.",
      "sources": [
        "reyes-gonzalez-2014-abejas-sin-aguijon-michoacan",
        "martinez-puc-2024-meliponicultura-peninsula-yucatan"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The scale claimed for the practice is high and rests on a single background statement rather than on a count made in the paper that prints it: the Yucatan peninsula is said to have reached densities of up to 500 colonies, a level the authors compare with the management of honeybees in medieval Europe. The comparison is offered without a primary citation and is repeated here with that limitation attached.",
      "sources": [
        "martinez-puc-2024-meliponicultura-peninsula-yucatan"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The collapse of the practice is not dated to the conquest by either of the modern studies read here. The Yucatan survey attributes the abandonment chiefly to the introduction of Apis mellifera colonies from the United States in 1911, together with forest fragmentation driven by extensive livestock farming, henequen and sugarcane. In the Michoacan municipality studied, 90 per cent of the local experts place the beginning of the decline in the 1960s, and name competition from Apis mellifera, land-use change, drought and pesticides. The pressure that ended it was industrial and nineteenth- and twentieth-century, which does not mean the colonial centuries were neutral - only that neither paper measures them.",
      "sources": [
        "martinez-puc-2024-meliponicultura-peninsula-yucatan",
        "reyes-gonzalez-2014-abejas-sin-aguijon-michoacan"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The knowledge survives as a working craft and is measured as one. In the Michoacan study eight species in six genera were recorded, the honey used against cold, cough, bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses, the honey and pollen eaten directly, and the wax made into the candles burned at dia de muertos; the knowledge passed from fathers to sons in 85 per cent of cases, with women specialising in processing. A collector took on average four nests a year for six litres of honey and four kilograms of wax. In the Yucatan peninsula survey of 2021 to 2023, 34 per cent of the keepers were women, they held on average 14 colonies against the men's 36.19, and honey yield per colony did not differ between them.",
      "sources": [
        "reyes-gonzalez-2014-abejas-sin-aguijon-michoacan",
        "martinez-puc-2024-meliponicultura-peninsula-yucatan"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "What none of these four sources supplies is the colonial middle. Oviedo reports the bees of one island and defers the mainland; Landa describes a practice and a festival, not an extraction; and neither modern paper gives a figure for honey or wax taken as tribute, or for what the encomienda and the doctrina did to the trade in either. This object therefore states no quantity for the colonial period, and the three centuries between Landa's festival and the Apis colonies of 1911 are left as a gap rather than filled by inference.",
      "sources": [
        "oviedo-historia-1851-tomo1",
        "landa-relacion-yucatan-paris-1864",
        "martinez-puc-2024-meliponicultura-peninsula-yucatan"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of Maya beekeeping either stop at the Madrid Codex or begin at the modern revival, and the sixteenth-century Spanish testimony is usually reduced to a sentence about Landa. This object puts the two Spanish witnesses on the page in their own words - including Oviedo's admission that he has put the bees in the wrong chapter and his flat negative for Hispaniola, which is evidence about the Antilles and not about Mesoamerica - alongside two peer-reviewed field studies that count species, colonies, yields and keepers. It also declines the narrative both halves of the literature invite: the decline is dated where the sources date it, to 1911 and the 1960s, and the colonial centuries are recorded as a gap in the evidence rather than assigned a verdict.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-17",
  "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/abejas-sin-aguijon-de-las-indias",
  "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/abejas-sin-aguijon-de-las-indias.json",
  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "The stingless bees of the Indies: Mesoamerican beekeeping in the Spanish record",
    "description": "Oviedo opens his chapter on wasps by apologising that the bees should have come first, then reports that Hispaniola has none and Tierra Firme has many kinds. Landa found the hives already property in Yucatan, with a festival held for the abundance of their honey and a named patron. The bees were stingless Meliponini, kept for millennia; the modern literature dates their collapse not to the conquest but to 1911 and to the 1960s.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/abejas-sin-aguijon-de-las-indias",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-17",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar Oceano, primera parte - the text of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=yw4-AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA280"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan sacada de lo que escrivio el padre fray Diego de Landa de la orden de San Francisco (Spanish text)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=exorAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA318"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Sociodemographic characteristics and participation of women in meliponiculture from the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11657536/"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Diversity, local knowledge and use of stingless bees (Apidae: Meliponini) in the municipality of Nocupetaro, Michoacan, Mexico",
        "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4061457/"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "The stingless bees of the Indies: Mesoamerican beekeeping in the Spanish record"
  }
}