(AGENPARL) – Mon 19 May 2025 [cid:f877ff49-f573-40bb-b5c0-94e8c8ccf466]
Bees for biodiversity in Belize
How this vital winged insect boosts the production and incomes that keep a community and forest intact
[cid:8be94f3e-d73e-4067-9ea1-11ac305237b4]
©FAO/Ya’axche Conservation Trust
At the age of 57, Eventir Cal owes his continued livelihood to the unlikeliest of allies: bees. For many years, Eventir has cultivated a mix of crops to feed his family of nine. Whether maize, beans, squash or vegetables, he spent most of his life using the practice of intercropping as part of Indigenous Peoples’ traditional milpa systems. It is central to the way of life in the lush mosaic of protected forests, wildlife sanctuaries and lands cultivated and stewarded by the Maya people in southern Belize.
But after a serious accident on the farm, Eventir’s mobility became impaired and getting to the communal fields of the milpa became challenging. He needed to start farming closer to his house on a smaller plot and to adopt cultivation methods that maximise his food production and support his family and community.
Eventir had already learned from the Mayan local organization, the Ya’axché Conservation Trust, some agroforestry techniques, like shade-grown cocoa, to enhance his farming and keep the soils richer and the forest intact. With the support of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), Eventir embraced one more forest-friendly practice: beekeeping.
Bees play a vital role as pollinators across a wide range of ecosystems, including forest landscapes and food crops worldwide. Nearly 90 percent of wild flowering plants depend on bees and other pollinators to sprout future generations, and 75 percent of the world’s food crops depend on it in part. By pollinating both wild and cultivated plants, bees and other pollinators play an important role in maintaining ecosystem services and biodiversity, while also supporting global food security and nutrition.
That’s particularly important where Eventir lives, in what’s known as the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. Stretching from Mexico to Panama, the corridor is a global hotspot for biodiversity. Belize keeps the northern edge of the corridor intact, and the Maya Golden Landscape in the south of the country is the last remaining link connecting the broadleaf rainforests of the mountain slopes to those of the Caribbean coast, hosting endangered and rare animal and plant species. Pollinators, including bees, are essential to holding together the web of biodiversity.
Eventir joined 35 producers in the Maya Golden Landscape to participate in beekeeping workshops and receive support to invest in beekeeping operations. He learned how to select sites, capture bees and implement new production and harvesting techniques for various bee products.
With this knowledge, Eventir set up his bee hives near his home, monitoring his bees’ health and preparing for his first honey harvest. The bees offered the perfect way to keep up his livelihood while caring for his own well-being and the health of the forest and farm he relied on.
Within two years, Eventir’s bees were abuzz and keeping him as busy as they were.
In addition to the bee products he could sell, beekeeping was also enhancing the yield and quality of his fruit and vegetable crops due to greater pollination, a perfect example of using biodiversity wisely. Providing habitats for pollinators to multiply and thrive exemplifies how farmers can sustainably harness the power of biodiversity to enhance crop productivity.
Among the different species of bees Eventir keeps is a type of stingless bee native to Belize. Though they produce less honey than honeybees, the Maya people especially value the honey of stingless bees as a traditional cure, and new jars of it fly off the shelf within a day. Eventir expects the bees to produce enough honey to begin selling at local markets this year.
Central America and the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor are facing more frequent and longer periods of drought, and forests and surrounding farms here are facing drier soil conditions.
In 2024, wildfires swept through southern Belize and the Maya Golden Landscape, burning for six weeks across more than 20 000 hectares of forests and destroying farms in their path. Eventir lost a harvest of crops to the fires, and two colonies of bees abandoned his apiaries to escape from the extreme smoke. These setbacks only redoubled his resolve to protect bees and promote climate-resilient agriculture.
With the help of the GEF-funded FAO project, he built back his apiaries and is rebuilding his bee colonies while educating his community on the importance of bees. When wild bee colonies are found in homes, he helps to safely relocate the colonies to his farm. “Before, people would burn the bees because they didn’t know what else to do,” he says. “Now they call me, and I take them to a safe place.”
Coupling Mayan Indigenous Peoples’, centuries-old knowledge with the beekeeping capacity support provided by FAO and its partners, Eventir has become a role model and source of expertise. Meanwhile, the pollination provided by his bees is contributing to increased crop yields without having to clear more forests to plant more crops. With bees helping plants reproduce and maintain biodiverse ecosystems and Eventir in turn harvesting honey, safeguarding bee colonies and promoting sustainable cultivation, they are, together, building a more resilient and sustainable environment and a healthy community.
The story and photos can be found here: https://www.fao.org/newsroom/story/bees-for-biodiversity-in-belize/en
All feature stories can be accessed here: http://www.fao.org/news/stories-archive/en/
Media outlets are welcome to reproduce the article or use the information contained in it, as well as related photos, provided that FAO and the photographers are given credit. A link back to the original story is also appreciated.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
FAO News and Media
Online tools
Photos and Videos: FAO Digital Media Hub
Photos: FAOnews Flickr account
FAO News: Newsroom website
FAO feature and in-depth stories: Stories website
Social Media: @FAOnews
This email was issued by the Media Office at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).