Beekeeping in the Yucatán Hacienda: The Role of the Melipona beecheii in the Nineteenth-Century Rural Landscape from an Environmental History Approach

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper examines the role of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii in nineteenth-century Yucatán and shows how the rise of the hacienda system played a contingent role in reshaping beekeeping practices and human-bee relationships. Using primary sources such as beekeeping manuals and wills, this paper will reconstruct the way beekeeping became a central component of both the agricultural projects of the hacendados (or hacienda owners) and in the agro-urban economy that flourished in Yucatán as a response to food scarcity in times of war. Finally, it will show that at the end of the nineteenth century, the domestic hives’ significance increased to the point of becoming a notable category recorded in the first economic census of domestic animals. How can we best understand the presence of the Melipona in the late-nineteenth-century Yucatán Peninsula? I argue that during a period of upheaval, extraction of natural resources, environmental exploitation, Melipona beecheii continued to be the most important bee species used for beeswax and honey extraction in the entire peninsula in the nineteenth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39712.0