The stingless bees of the Indies: Mesoamerican beekeeping in the Spanish record

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.