For a beekeeping couple in Costa Rica, pesticides are killing the buzz

IZTARU, Costa Rica — “This simple wooden beehive is 20 years old. It was the first little bee house I ever made. I call it a relic; it’s sacred to me,” Guillermo Valverde Azofeifa, 63, says as he wanders through his garden filled with bee-friendly flowers and fruit trees. He now has 50 hives housing several different species of native Melipona stingless bees.

However, just a few short steps from his home, this idyllic scene comes to an end: vast swaths of land are covered with monoculture fields of cassava.

“Our neighbor uses too many poisons,” Valverde Azofeifa says. “If it continues, everything we’ve been trying so hard to conserve over the last two decades will be lost. It’s so hard to see our bees dying. Six months ago, we began a legal battle to save them.”

Valverde Azofeifa lives in the village of Iztarú, 20 kilometers (12 miles) outside the district of Guápiles in northeastern Costa Rica. This region, just two hours from the border with Nicaragua, has seen an increase in monoculture production. Right next to Valverde Azofeifa’s garden are 3 hectares (7.4 acres) of cassava, and just 3 km (1.9 mi) away, immense fields of pineapple stretch as far as the eye can see.

“The Meliponas are in danger,” he says. “Many forests have been cut down to create pastures and fields for crops. We are surrounded by African palm and pineapple and there is a field of cassava right next door. Every time they use pesticides, our bees die because they are collecting poisoned pollen.”

More than two decades ago, Valverde Azofeifa married Andrea Mora Montero. They share a passion for these ancestral insects of Central America; stingless bees were considered gods by the Maya people. Together, Guillermo and Andrea embarked on this project to conserve the native bees. In their garden they have seven species of Melipona stingless bee, which are particularly crucial for the pollination of tropical fruit trees. The different bees produce different types of honey, from the largest species, Melipona costaricensis, to the smallest, Plebeia frontalis, as well as solitary bees that search for a place to rest in hollow bamboo canes.

Saving the Melipona bees is a real passion, and the couple dedicate all their time to their quest. But recently, their mission became a battle.

“Two years ago, our neighbour began spraying the cassava with pesticides,” Valverde Azofeifa says. “Since then, we’ve lost half of our hives. Some are even dying now, from the latest spraying.” As he speaks, he opens one of the hives of the Tetragonisca angustula bee, his wife’s favorite species, which recently died. The purple flowers painted on the outside of the hive open to reveal a brown shapeless mass made of wax and pollen.

“In the last six months we have asked for help from various institutions,” says Mora Montero, wearing her bee earrings. She lists them: the National Animal Health Service; the Ministry for Agriculture and Livestock, or MAG; and the Agrarian Court in Guápiles.

“The officials from MAG say they are unfamiliar with what we do, so we’re now waiting for one of their representatives to come and learn about beekeeping,” Mora Montero says. “That way they can understand what measures they need to impose on our neighbor. We feel that nobody really recognizes the importance of the bees; we’re fighting this battle alone. It makes me so sad to see the Meliponas die.”

Pineapple plantations

“We planted the garden with bee-friendly flowers so the bees can stay here to feed, rather than have to collect pollen from the neighboring cassava, or travel over to the pineapples,” Valverde Azofeifa says, showing the variety of flowers in their garden: tiny sunflowers, Christ thorn (Euphorbia milii) and different types of basil, nestled in among others.

“Over on the horizon, there was once a mountain covered with virgin forest. Five years ago, they brought in a digger and cleared huge areas of it. They felled the trees with no forestry control at all. We managed to rescue one hive, but then they cleared everything and gave it over to pineapple,” Valverde Azofeifa says.

Loss of habitat has a huge impact on bees; a lack of plants and flowers means reduced food sources and less space to build their hives. This can lead to the disappearance of whole species, as well as wider environmental impacts.

“Carving up the land into fields, the loss of ecological niches, climate change which impacts flowers, the use of agricultural chemicals — all these things threaten the existence of the bees we have here in Costa Rica,” says Mariana Acuña Cordero, a biologist and expert on the country’s native bees. “There are around 700 different species in the country — from the exotic to the native as well as solitary bees — but we have no studies on exact numbers or on the influence of variables that lead to the death of bees.”

Despite the fact that the country has managed to maintain or even increase levels of forest cover, pressures from monoculture production, urbanization and the loss of forests are threatening the favorable conditions for the bees.

The latest data from REDD+, the U.N. program on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in tropical forest countries, estimates that over the past three years, around 1,400 hectares (3,500 acres) of primary forest has been destroyed per year in Costa Rica. This figure is supported by data from Global Forest Watch. The greatest increase came from the loss of smaller areas of forest that measure less than 1 hectare (2.5 acres).

“We’ve seen a growth in activities that we refer to as forest degradation,” says Héctor Arce Benavides, director of the REDD+ program in Costa Rica. “These activities refer to the extraction of biomass while the land use remains the same. We’re talking about small areas of forest that are very difficult to evaluate using satellite images, or the extraction of large trees around the edges of the forest.”

These piecemeal instances of deforestation added up. Costa Rica saw a near doubling of greenhouse gas emissions, Benavides says: “From 2018 to 2019, we went from 1.3 million tons per year to 2.5 million.”

In an email to Mongabay Latam, Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy suggested the monocultures are not a factor in the loss of forest. “Monocultures do not play a huge role in this aspect of deforestation,” the ministry wrote. “The main crops are established in areas that have been defined for many years. These are not significant vehicles for deforestation.”

An ocean of pineapples

From Mora Montero and Valverde Azofeifa’s bee sanctuary you can see the vast monoculture fields of pineapple running alongside a potholed road toward Guápiles. As you continue along the road, you encounter oil palms, a private airfield, followed by the pineapples that cover both sides of the road like a huge green blanket, separated into orderly lines. The tropical midday sun lights up the leaves. It’s a green desert with no laborers, just a spraying machine passing along with its wide arms sprinkling pesticide. The pineapples continue all the way to the Nicaraguan border, approximately 160 km (100 mi) away.

“The state just isn’t there to control the effect of the monoculture expansion on the environment and the cost to human health,” says Tania Rodriguez Echavarría, a professor of political ecology at the University of Costa Rica (UCR) who is studying extractivism in the border regions of the country. “The Costa Rica brand is a very superficial green stamp; if you even just lightly scratch the surface, the incongruencies are there for all to see.”

In these regions, pineapple in particular has crept into protected areas of Costa Rica, like Tortuguero National Park and the Costa Rica Wildlife Refuge (Refugio Nacional de Vida Silvestre Mixto Maquenque), an important wetlands sanctuary.

“The pineapple growers have expanded their area, edging into protected zones,” says Fernando Ramírez Muñoz, a researcher in toxic substances at the National University. “They have drained and dried out wetlands to grow their crops, particularly near Caño Negro and the region bordering Nicaragua.”

According to the most recent analysis from the Monitoring System for Land Use and Cover Change in Productive Landscapes (MOCUPP), pineapple crops were responsible for the loss of more than 343 hectares (848 acres) of tree cover between 2017 and 2018.

For the bees, the deadly and non-deadly effects of the pesticides used in monoculture production are evident, as on Mora Montero and Valverde Azofeifa’s plot. Johan Van Veen, director of the Center for the Investigation of Tropical Beekeeping at the National University, says the pesticides have two effects: “The bees carry the poison directly to their hives with a high level of mortality [but] there is also an indirect effect because [the pesticides] eliminate many of the foods that [the bees] need throughout the year … Unfortunately, despite the image of being