Stingless melipona bees are now legal rights-holders in two municipalities in the Peruvian Amazon.
Satipo, in the Junin region, passed the world’s first municipal ordinance recognizing an insect as a rights-holder on Oct. 21, 2025. Two months later, on Dec. 22, the municipality of Nauta-Loreto approved an equivalent measure.
The case was reported in a letter published in the journal Nature in May 2026, authored by researchers Shi-Jie Wang and A.J. Wubie.
What the Ordinance Actually Says
Municipal Ordinance No. 033-2025-CM/MPS, enacted by the Provincial Municipality of Satipo on Oct. 27, declares native stingless bees of the tribe Meliponini — and their habitat — to be rights-holders within the territory of the Avireri-VRAEM Biosphere Reserve.
It’s worth being precise about the scope of this measure.
This is not a national Peruvian law. These are two municipal ordinances governing a specific reserve — one declared by UNESCO in 2021 — that covers roughly 15,830 square miles of Amazonian rainforest and Andean highlands.
Until now, that status had been granted only to the European honeybee (Apis mellifera).
Satipo and Nauta-Loreto went a step further, granting these insects intrinsic rights.
Those rights include the right to exist and flourish, to maintain healthy populations, to live in a pollution-free environment, to regenerate their natural cycles, and to have legal representation against environmental threats — a provision that allows indigenous communities and conservation organizations to litigate on their behalf.
The Role of Meliponas in Amazonian Pollination
It’s worth distinguishing between two separate claims here.
The first is a broad scientific consensus, independent of this ordinance: the vast majority of tropical plant species depend on animal pollinators to reproduce.
The second is specific to the reserve. The technical report that supported the Satipo ordinance estimated that within the Avireri-VRAEM territory, melipona bees pollinate roughly 90% of wild plant species.
Earth Law Center, one of the organizations that championed the ordinance, credits these bees with pollinating more than 80% of Amazonian flora more broadly, including crops such as coffee, cacao, avocado, and blueberry.
Peru is home to at least 175 species of stingless bees — nearly half of the approximately 500 known species worldwide — most of them concentrated in the Amazon basin.
Among the species named specifically in the ordinance are Melipona eburnea, Melipona illota, Melipona grandis, and Tetragonisca angustula.
The Threats That Prompted Action
The ordinance responds to a range of documented threats facing these insects.
They include deforestation, which eliminates the trees where colonies nest; wildfires, which in 2024 burned through nearly 6.9 million acres in Peru — the largest area on record for the country; and the use of agrochemicals for purely cosmetic purposes, now prohibited within Satipo’s protected zones.
Adding to those pressures is competition from Africanized bees, an invasive species that displaces native populations. The ordinance also explicitly bans the burning of hives, honeycombs, or swarms within protected areas.
For the Ashaninka and Kukama-Kukamiria communities in the region, stingless bees are more than an economic resource.
Their traditional practice of keeping these bees, known as meliponiculture, yields honey, pollen, and wax — and represents ancestral knowledge passed down across generations.
A 2023 study published in the journal Food and Humanity identified compounds in melipona honey with antibacterial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, and anticancer properties, which the authors link to the bees’ contact with the forest’s medicinal plants.
A Precedent Within a Broader Legal Movement
Granting rights to species or ecosystems is not a new idea in Latin America.
Ecuador enshrined the rights of nature in its 2008 constitution, and Colombia recognized the Atrato River as a rights-holder in 2016.
What sets the Peruvian case apart, according to Wang and Wubie’s letter in Nature, is that it represents the first recognition of this kind granted specifically to an insect anywhere in the world.
The push behind both ordinances was led by the organization Amazon Research Internacional, founded by Vasquez Espinoza, together with Earth Law Center and the indigenous organizations Reserva Comunal Ashaninka and EcoAshaninka.
A public petition launched by these groups has already gathered more than 385,000 signatures. Its organizers aim to reach 500,000 before submitting it to Peru’s national authorities — an effort to extend these protections beyond the municipal boundaries of Satipo and Nauta-Loreto.
