“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.”
Eden Research plc (LON:EDEN) is an AIM-quoted company focussed on sustainable biopesticides and plastic-free encapsulation technology for the use in global crop protection, animal health and consumer products industries.