bees | Geo-Mexico, the geography of Mexico

The geography of honey production in Mexico

Jan 272016

Mexico has a long history of honey (miel) production. Honey was important in Maya culture, a fact reflected in some place names found in the Yucatán Peninsula, such as Cobá (“place of the bees”).

Faced by the arrival of Africanized bees – The diffusion of the Africanized honey bee in North America – Mexico’s modern commercial beekeepers initially feared the worst. With time, they became less antagonistic to Africanized bees, since, whatever their faults, they proved to be good honey producers.

Main honey producing states in Mexico

Honey production has been on the rise in the past decade. Over the past five years, Mexican hives have yielded about 57,000 tons of honey a year, making Mexico the world’s sixth largest honey producing country. Preliminary figures for 2015 show that Mexico produced 61,881 tons of honey.

Mexico is also the world’s third leading exporter of honey with total exports (both conventional and organic honey) of 45,000 tons in 2015, a new record, worth over US$150 million. Mexico’s principal export markets for honey are Germany, the USA, the U.K. Saudia Arabia and Belgium.

Postage stamp depicting honey exports

Other major exporters of honey include China, Argentina, New Zealand and Germany.

There are 42,000 beekeepers nationwide, operating 1.9 million hives; the main producing area remains the southeast, especially the states of Campeche, Yucatán and Quintana Roo. Jalisco, Chiapas, Veracruz, Oaxaca, Guerrero, Puebla and Michoacán are also important for honey production.

The domestic consumption of honey in Mexico has risen from under 200 grams per person in the 1990s to more than 300 grams in 2010. This is mainly due to the use of honey in processed foods such as cereals, yogurts and pastries.

The major value of bees in an ecosystem is not for their honey production, but on account of their vital role in the pollination of trees and food crops, a contribution valued in the US alone at more than 10 billion dollars.

Views about the pollinating ability of Africanized bees, compared to European or native bees, are mixed. Some farmers dislike having to cope with potentially aggressive bees. Others claim that Africanized bees are far more efficient pollinators than European bees since they forage more often and at greater distances than their European counterparts. The available evidence does not appear to suggest that the arrival of Africanized bees had any impact on crop yields in Mexico.
Which Mexican honey should you buy? For a cautionary tale about choosing the best Mexican honey in overseas stores, see Honey, what’s on that label?

Sources:

(a) La producción apícola en México by Carlos Angeles Toriz and Ana María Román de Carlos. (date unknown)
(b) “Mexico ranks sixth in honey production” (reprinted from El Economista on mexicanbusinessweek.com), 2011.

This post was first written in October 2011, with updates in October 2015 and January 2016.

Honey, what’s on that label?

Other 2 Responses »

Oct 192015

While updating our posts on honey recently, we took a look at which brands of Mexican honey sell overseas and how these brands are labeled. Let’s take a closer look at two of them.

Alasia Honey from the Yucatan (click to enlarge)

First up is Alasia Honey, labeled as “Pure Mexican Yucatan Tropical Forest Honey”. The smaller print says that “This Mexican honey is from the tropical forests of the Yucatan peninsula, the ancient heart of the Maya people, where beekeeping has been a spiritual art for thousands of years.” Great description, and sounds pretty accurate in all respects. Native Mexican honeybees were, and are, important to the Maya people, and the natural vegetation of most of the Yucatan Peninsula is, indeed, tropical evergreen forest.

Next up is Asda Mexican Fairtrade Organic Clear Mexican Honey:

Asda Fair Trade Mexican Honey (click to enlarge)

Anytime the “Fairtrade” name is used, most people assume that it is likely to be more respectful to the producers, and probably also assume that any further description will be culturally sensitive and geographically accurate. This is only partly true for the Asda honey. Below the Fairtrade symbol, it says “Guarantees a better deal for Third World Producers.” The term “Third World” slipped out of fashion (for good reason) a long time ago, so hardly counts as contemporary development terminology.

The small print along the bottom of the label says, “Specially sourced from farms in the remote areas of the Mexican Sierras”. Hmm… really?? There are several areas of high relief in Mexico that are named “Sierra” (“Mountain Range”), the two major ones being the Western Sierra Madre and the Eastern Sierra Madre, both well to the north of Mexico’s main honey-producing states. Most organic honey in Mexico comes from the Yucatán Peninsula, where there are no Sierras. Hence, the claim that this honey originates in “remote areas of the Mexican Sierras” is, at best, geographically ambiguous, and at worst, geographically inaccurate.

We don’t know which honey tastes better, but we do know which has the more honest and culturally-sensitive labeling!

Related posts:

Common errors of Mexican geography: confusing the Sierra Madre with the Volcanic Axis

The diffusion of the Africanized honey bee in North America: a bio-geographical case study

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Oct 082011

Africanized honey bees, sometimes popularly called “killer” bees, resulted from the crossing (hybridization) of European honey bees and African honey bees. They combine the best and the worst of both sets of relatives. Africanized honey bees are slightly smaller than European honey bees, but more aggressive and less inclined to remain in one place. They can swarm and attack even if unprovoked, even though they can sting only once before dying shortly afterward.

Their “killer bee” label is because they have killed 1,000 people in the Americas since their ancestors escaped from a laboratory in Brazil. Africanized bees react ten times faster to disturbances than European bees and can pursue a hapless human victim for 300-400 meters.

The mixing of genes that created Africanized honey bees occurred in the 1950s. In 1956, Dr. Warwick Kerr, a bee researcher in Brazil, hoped to develop a bee that would thrive in Brazil’s tropical climate. He decided to cross European bees with African bees. Unfortunately, in March of the following year, some of his experimental bees escaped into the wild. The Africanized bees soon began to multiply and expand their range. They proved to be very adaptable, and have since spread, at a rate of up to 350 km/year through most of South and Central America, as well as into Mexico and the USA. They arrived in Peru by 1985 and Panama by 1982. Their spread northwards continued, and they crossed from Guatemala into Mexico, near Tapachula, in October 1986.

The map shows the gradual northward spread of Africanized bees in Mexico. Up to 1987, the progression looks fairly regular, but in the following year, Africanized bees’ northward movement was restricted to a zone along Mexico’s Gulf Coast. This remained true even through 1989. By 1990, the “front” of the bees advance once again stretched right across the country.

Q. What factors may have caused the unusual (anomalous) geographic spread of Africanized bees in 1988 and 1989?

Map of africanized bees spread across Mexico

Africanized bees spread across Mexico (adapted from Kunzmann et al)

Why are Africanized bees more migratory than European bees?

Scientists believe that Africanized bees are uniquely equipped to cope with the unpredictability of suitable food sources in the tropics. They are more opportunistic, changing their foraging habits to suit local conditions, including short-term supplies of pollen, which they will collect and store to ensure their survival. When a new resource presents itself, Africanized bees will swarm rapidly to maximize their use of the new pollen source.

In bio-geographical terms, Africanized bees are an example of an opportunistic or r-species, perfectly equipped to move to new or changing habitats. They reproduce rapidly, and use available resources efficiently. This makes them far less stable than European bees which thrive in a more predictable environment and adapt to changing circumstances far less quickly.

Africanized bees can survive on limited food supplies, will explore and move to new locations frequently and are aggressive in defending their resources. When they come into contact with other less aggressive bees, such as Mexico’s native bees, Africanized bees may out-compete them for pollen and eventually replace them as that area’s dominant bees.

In Mexico, the speed of diffusion of Africanized bees slowed down

When Africanized bees were reported from southern Mexico, US beekeepers began to fret. The US honey industry is worth 150 million dollars a year. Fear spread that Africanized bees might jeopardize the entire industry, mainly because they are prone to migrate, and would be hard to control.

US experts helped finance a joint program in Mexico which aimed to slow down the bees’ progress northwards. The original idea was to stop bees from crossing the narrowest part of Mexico, the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, preventing them from reaching central Mexico. However, by the time funding was approved, some bees had already crossed the Isthmus. The focus of the bee-control plan was changed to trying to slow down their seemingly inexorable progress north. Even if scientists could only delay the bees’ progress, it would give US farmers more time to plan for their eventual arrival.

The plan was relatively simple. Hang sufficient bee traps in trees throughout the region to attract wild swarms while banning Mexican beekeepers from moving any hives from southern Mexico into central or northern Mexico. Thousands of distinctive blue boxes appeared in orchards and forests across a broad belt of Mexico, from the Pacific to the Gulf.

The combined Mexico-US program is credited with having slowed the bees’ entry into the USA down by about two years. Even so, by 1990, Africanized bees were spotted in Texas; they reached Arizona by 1993 and California by 1995. By this time, they were also found throughout Mexico.

In a later post, we will look at honey production in Mexico and see whether or not it was permanently affected by the influx of Africanized bees.

Sources:

(a) “Africanized Bees in North America” by Michael R. Kunzmann et al, in Non-native Species by Hiram W. Li (biology.usgs.gov)

(b) Introduced Species Summary Project: Africanized Honey Bee by Christina Ojar, 2002.