Country

Suriname

Suriname is giving us two honey worlds at once. In the country's forested interior, Indigenous communities are expanding stingless-bee meliponiculture as an alternative livelihood to destructive logging and gold mining. Amazon Conservation Team now reports 80 beekeepers in five villages managing about 480 stingless-bee hives. In Kwamalasamutu, the Trio people distinguish dozens of local kinds of bees, and beekeeper-technicians have shifted from extracting colonies from trees toward keeping them in reusable wooden boxes. Farther north in Marowijne, a modern Honey Cluster is connecting women and young producers in Moengo and Wanhatti with markets. Roy Tini, owner of BeeMaster Tini, chairs that cluster, while FAO programs are helping producers sell honey, beeswax and propolis. Suriname's story is therefore not simply tropical honey. It is about forest knowledge becoming organized enterprise without abandoning the forest that makes the honey possible.