Indigenous women record age-old knowledge of bees in Colombia’s Amazon
“There are three researchers in each community. Their main activity is to sit down with the elders — who have the knowledge — to listen to them and ask about the origin of the bees,” says Carmenza.
By Astrid Arellano
Translated by Maria Angeles Salazar
Mongabay
February 2023
Excerpt:
A team of Indigenous Yucuna women in the Colombian Amazon are rescuing and documenting the remaining oral knowledge on bees and their roles in the ecosystem, along with the traditional classification system of diverse bee species.
With the help of nine elders, they are documenting and sketching tales and songs to gather bee names, characteristics, behaviors, roles in their crop fields and the places where bees build beehives.
Biologists part of a bee inventory program and the women from the reserve are working to compare each other’s findings on bee species in the Indigenous territory, where researchers say bees are better protected than other regions of Colombia.
Some of the traditional tales and knowledge are even surprising to the women documenting it; they say the details and scientific information will be shared with the communities and local schools to raise awareness on the importance of protecting bees.
“There are three researchers in each community. Their main activity is to sit down with the elders — who have the knowledge — to listen to them and ask about the origin of the bees,” says Carmenza. “The women collect the information, then they write and draw to work on the bee classification system: how many bees there are, their colors and their sizes.”
Carmenza says that even with the research process and its results, the findings and daily learnings keep surprising them.
“The women are really astonished because bees are such small animals in our territory but there wasn’t attention given to their care and [the women] didn’t know the tales,” says Carmenza.
“This [effort] gave [stories] a new life. Now, they tell their children that bees shouldn’t be touched, that they are sacred because they were purposefully created since the beginning, and that they help humanity and nature — which is very important to us culturally.”
