The scope of human law has grown to embrace an unlikely class of rights holders: wild, stingless bees. In October 2025, officials in the Peruvian province of Satipo passed the world’s first ordinance granting legal rights to an insect, with a similar ordinance soon following in the Peruvian town of Nauta.
These laws are among the latest successes for the rights of nature movement, a global campaign commonly associated with safeguarding rivers, mountains, forests, and the relatively large, charismatic animals that inhabit them.
“This first case for a tiny insect kind of reshifts people's perspective,” Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, a Peruvian chemical biologist and founder of Amazon Research International, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving biodiversity and Indigenous knowledge, told Discover. “Hopefully it will show that it can be done at any scale.”
Read More: How Stingless Bees in the Amazon Became the First Insects With Legal Rights
Why It’s Important to Protect Stingless Bees
For such diminutive creatures, Peru’s 175 species of stingless bee play a very important role in both ecosystems and human communities. They are likely the Amazon’s most critical pollinators, according to Espinoza, essential to the reproduction of hundreds of plant species; and their honey, with its wide-ranging medicinal properties, serves as a natural pharmacy for the local Asháninka, according to a study in Ethnobiology and Conservation.
Explore All OptionsWhen hives disappear, she added, “it’s as if you and I get closed off from access to any hospitals or pharmacies.”
The ancient relationship between bees and humans certainly helped their cause. In addition to the insects’ ecological significance, Espinoza noted, beekeeping offers a constructive alternative livelihood for people who might otherwise engage in illegal logging and mining — the very activities that most threaten bee populations and biodiversity in general, according to a study in the Journal of Biogeology.
The practical justification for defending bees is self-evident in a way that it isn’t for, say, jaguars.
“But it ended up becoming this innovative door through which to protect the rainforest and the ecosystems,” Espinoza told Discover, “which in turn, of course, protects your larger mammals.”
Under the legal codes of Satipa and Nauta, stingless bees now enjoy several concrete freedoms: to “exist and thrive,” to “maintain healthy populations,” to live in “ecologically stable climatic conditions” in “a healthy habitat free from pollution.” Most crucially, they have the right to legal representation.
“People can speak on behalf of the bees,” Espinoza said. “If they see something that shouldn't be happening”—logging, pesticide use or cultivation of non-native honeybees in protected areas, for example — “people can rise and make a case.”
Inspiring Others to Protect Some of the Smallest Creatures
Whether those rights will prove enforceable rather than symbolic remains an open question. No legal proceedings have yet been brought for the infringement of bee rights, but Espinoza said a regulatory plan is in development to make it easy for local communities to report violations.
“If the pathway is not easy,” she told Discover, “people won't take action.”
Beyond punitive measures, Espinoza is working with local authorities on proactive strategies. She and her colleagues have already mapped wild hives throughout the 16,000-square-mile Avireri-Vraem Biosphere Reserve in central Peru, and she hopes to establish a monitoring plan for the trees that stingless bees most prefer. If hive locations are known, the thinking goes, perhaps they can be rescued from fires or legal deforestation.
Since Peru laid the groundwork for insect rights, groups from diverse countries have expressed interest in pursuing similar protections for their own wild bees.
“It’s resonating globally,” Espinoza said, from Bolivia to Poland to Zimbabwe. For her, that momentum reflects something deeper than the novel legal experiment — rather than inventing a new relationship with nature, she argues, the ordinances simply formalize a much older one.
“It just became an obvious extension in the legal language of what Indigenous perspectives have been all about for a long time,” she concluded, “which is that nature is alive.”
Read More: Up to 8 Million Bees Are Living in an Underground Network Beneath This Cemetery
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
- This article references information from Earth Law Center: Satipo Approves Historic Ordinance: In World First, An Insect Is Granted Legal Rights
- This article references information from a study published in Ethnobiology and Conservation: Traditional ecological knowledge on stingless bees in two Ashaninka communities in the central rainforest of Peru
- This article references information from a study published in the Journal of Biogeology: The effect of tropical deforestation on stingless bees of the genus Melipona (Insecta: Hymenoptera: Apidae: Meliponini) in central Rondonia, Brazil
- This article references information from a study published in the Journal of Biogeology: Spatial distribution, tree host associations, and deforestation threats on two stingless bee species in the Peruvian Amazon
