Landscape with Bees: Beekeeping at Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, Yucatán, Mexico

We examine how beekeeping and the production of honey and wax on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula was transformed in the wake of the sixteenth-century Spanish invasion and industrial revolution. Honey and wax produced from stingless bees (Melipona beecheii) were key commodities circulated throughout the prehispanic, colonial, and postcolonial periods. European honeybees (Apis mellifera) were introduced by the late nineteenth century, as demand for honey and wax transformed ecologies, technology, vegetative communities, and beekeeping practices. We compare archaeological, paleoethnobotanical, and soil chemical evidence of an apiary, likely for Apis mellifera, with documentary evidence for mixed species beekeeping at Hacienda San Pedro Cholul, a henequen plantation situated on the outskirts of Mérida.