36. Stingless Bees, Ancient Honey & the Amazon's Future – with Dr. Rosa Vasquez Espinosa

What if one of the most powerful tools for saving the Amazon rain-forest was a bee most people have never heard of?

Enter the stingless bee – a 65 million year old resident of Earth that produces honeys teeming with medicinal molecules and has co-evolved with indigenous Amazonian communities across millennia. Today, these bees are at the keystone species at the heart of a pioneering conservation movement spanning science, law, economics and Indigenous rights: one that recently secured the world's first legal recognition of the rights of an insect.

Dr. Rosa Vásquez Espinoza is the National Geographic Explorer and conservation scientist whose NGO Amazon Research Internacional is spearheading these initiatives. In this episode we explore the life world of the bees themselves, the pioneering science and bio-economies emerging around their extraordinary honey, the deep co-evolutionary bond between stingless bees and Amazonian communities, and how bridging indigenous and Western knowledge is proving essential for the forest, for the communities who steward the bees and the legal frameworks being built to protect them.

Episode Website Link: https://www.lifeworld.earth/episodes-blog/stinglessbeesamazonfuture

Links:

• Amazon Research International: Main Site
• Dr Rosa Vasquez Espinosa
• Book: The Spirit of the Rainforest
• Youtube: STINGLESS BEES AND THE BIODIVERSITY OF OUR AMAZON
• In Peru, a Mission to Save the Stingless Bee
• Nat Geo: Stingless bees make ‘miracle liquid.’
• Guardian: Stingless bees from the Amazon granted legal rights in world first
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Look out for meditations, poems, readings, and other snippets of inspiration in between episodes.

Music: Electric Ethnicity by Igor Dvorkin, Duncan Pittock, Ellie Kidd & The Rising by Tryad CCPL.

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