For giant armadillos, it’s an easy, protein-rich meal. For beekeepers, this means the loss of their livelihood, leading some to poison armadillos in retaliation.

To minimize this conflict between man and animal, Desbiez found a solution: honey made for armadillos.

“We decided to find a way to promote coexistence between beekeepers and giant armadillos,” he said.

Beekeepers who take mitigation measures to protect their hives from giant armadillos, while ensuring the species is not harmed, will receive an armadillo-friendly honey certificate, which they can add to their products to notify buyers. and increase the value of honey.

“Certification provides greater added value to the honey, so we can sell it at a better price,” Antonio Adames, a Cerrado beekeeper who is involved in the Canastras e Colmeias Project, told  Mongabay .

With the certificate, Adames said he sells his armadillo-friendly honey for 20% more than regular honey. For those who sell their honey at local markets, the project encourages them to protect armadillos by providing them with queen bees, which are more valuable to small beekeepers than certified ones.

“The idea is always that coexistence with giant armadillos brings benefits,” said Desbiez.

Conflicts between armadillos and beekeepers

Desbiez first heard about the conflict between the giant armadillo and beekeepers in 2015, during a field expedition in the Cerrado, a  highly fragmented biome that has been deforested at a rate 2.5 times higher than its neighboring biome, the Amazon. .

More than half of the Cerrado has been transformed into eucalyptus, soy and sugarcane monoculture areas or pastures for cattle.

The remaining fragments of native vegetation are shared by armadillos and beekeepers, who place their hives near Cerrado flowers. It is this overlapping of habitat that leads to conflicts between wildlife and humans.

In a  2020 study  , researchers interviewed 178 beekeepers – 53% of whom have more than half of their income supported by beekeeping – in the Cerrado and found that 46% of them reported that giant armadillos had damaged their hives in the previous 12 months, generating financial losses of at least 518 thousand reais.

The same study found that giant armadillos can knock down and break up to five hives in one night . One beekeeper lost 120 hives in two weeks, while another lost 460 hives (the equivalent of R$230,000) during his 14 years as a beekeeper.

Others had to abandon specific areas where they produced honey because of armadillos, and some beekeepers told of colleagues who gave up beekeeping altogether after suffering significant economic losses.

The giant armadillo is  the largest of all armadillo species , measuring up to 1.5 meters in length and weighing up to 60 kilograms. Camera traps reveal that they stand on their hind legs and push hives weighing up to 35 kilograms with their head and nose, resisting the stings of swarms of angry bees thanks to their thick skin and protective armor.

The loss of livelihoods has caused some beekeepers to poison armadillos to prevent them from attacking hives, which can have a devastating impact on armadillo populations.

Armadillos only have one baby every three years and only reach sexual maturity at 7 or 8 years of age. As a result, the “loss of a single individual can have significant impacts across populations,” according to a   2021 study .

Obtaining certification

As part of the Canastras e Hives Project, Desbiez uses monitoring, research and education to develop armadillo-friendly honey that supports both giant armadillo conservation and beekeepers’ livelihoods.

To obtain the certificate, beekeepers must adopt specific mitigation measures, such as the use of raised supports or electric fences with underground barriers to prevent armadillos from tunneling.

According to Desbiez, the 1.3 meter high supports proved to be the most effective, as they are low cost and can be made with easily accessible materials. Beekeepers also ensure that they commit to other sustainable practices, such as adopting safety measures when using smoke to avoid fire risks and not to deforest.

Beekeepers are very special actors. They are people who love nature. They depend on wildflowers and untouched nature. They are much more willing to coexist with wildlife.

Arnaud Desbiez, conservation biologist and president of the Institute for the Conservation of Wild Animals (ICAS)

By collaborating closely with beekeepers, Desbiez has helped issue more than 100 certificates across the Cerrado of Mato Grosso do Sul and is now working to help producers in the Amazon rainforest who are also looking to prevent giant armadillos from attacking their hives.

“These conflicts always occur in areas where the habitat has been greatly altered,” said Desbiez. “In the Pantanal, this does not happen because the habitat is more untouched.”

When they are unable to eat the bee larvae, giant armadillos turn to looking for ants and termites to feed themselves. “Preventing [them from eating maggots] doesn’t diminish or harm them in any way,” Desbiez said. “It just allows them to coexist with beekeepers.”

The protection of giant armadillos helps sustain other species in the Cerrado and Amazon regions . Giant armadillos are known to dig burrows five meters deep, which provide shelter from predators and the region’s extreme heat for more than twenty other types of species, including peccaries, ocelots and anteaters.

A  2013 study  referred to the giant armadillo as “an ecosystem engineer” that “may be of high value to the vertebrate community.”

Management of mitigation efforts

Mitigation measures must be carefully managed to ensure that the methods employed against the giant armadillo attack on hives work successfully. “If you find a solution, beekeepers will be happy to co-exist,” Desbiez said.

“However, research shows that beekeepers who have tried various methods without success start to get frustrated and this is where retaliation is possible.”

A  2021 study  analyzed the severity of conflicts between giant armadillos and beekeepers using a human-wildlife interaction framework.

The study found that conflicts are level one, the least severe type, which “means that the negative relationship between beekeepers and giant armadillos is not yet rooted in less visible and more complex social disagreements, but founded on a material dispute: the destruction of hives”.

The study also found that “on average, beekeepers had favorable attitudes toward giant armadillos.”

As conflicts stem from purely economic reasons, they tend to be easier to resolve. In comparison, conflicts between the jaguar and ranchers in the Pantanal are more complex due to a long history of persecuting the big cats in retaliation for livestock predation and a deeply ingrained perception of them as pests, classifying them as a “ level three conflict,” Desbiez said.

“When the conflict escalates, it becomes a conflict that also has societal values, where people already dislike the animal beyond the specific conflict,” he said. “There are negative social values ​​that jaguars are bad. We are very lucky that with giant armadillos we don’t have that perception.”

Where mitigation methods are in place and certificates have been issued, relationships between beekeepers and armadillos have improved significantly, both in the Cerrado and in the Amazon, and retaliatory killings have ceased.

“We are living peacefully with them today,” said Adames. “They are no longer disturbing the hives. Everything is going well.”

(By Sarah Brown)

This report was originally published on the Mongabay Brazil website .