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A crucial global project is Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, a living collection of small-scale, culturally significant, often-endangered foods that documents regional produce, grains, livestock, wild plants, insects and even sweeteners and seasonings, such as Chaco stingless bee honey from Bolivia and Malaysia’s Rimbàs black pepper.

The Amazon is home to hundreds of species of stingless bee, but as deforestation converts the tropical landscape into farms and ranches, these and other native pollinators are in danger of disappearing.

Pesticides, climate change and competition with the honey bee, which is better adapted to agricultural areas than the stingless bee, introduces more strain.

They have strict hierarchies like any other apian species, but stingless bee castes are determined by how much pollen an individual consumes.

"What we're looking at is the advancing front of a stingless bee colony," Heard says.