Sustainable Metrics Peru Research
Creighton University — Department of Biology
A seven-month undergraduate research project on when apiculture can contribute to sustainable rural development in Peru. I was responsible for the field-data structure the project runs on, interviewed beekeepers and institutions in Spanish across eleven apiaries, and independently developed its bee tourism research track.
Results
14Field interviews conducted in Spanish
From local producers to national sector leadership
Including beekeepers across 10 apiaries, Centro Bartolomé de las Casas, local guides, and the president of Peru’s national beekeeping association.
113Colonies documented across 11 apiaries
Comparable across sites and across future field seasons
Every colony recorded against a standardized ID scheme, so the next team inherits a dataset rather than a pile of notes.
60+Sources across 7 countries
Synthesized into a bee tourism roadmap for the Cusco region
International benchmarking, route design, host-readiness standards and a proposed pilot model — a research track I developed independently.
Left a reusable field-data architecture behind
National datasets organized to district level and a structure that supports continued comparative analysis after I left. The project runs through summer 2027; this was the pilot season.
The problem
Peru’s apiculture information was fragmented across government datasets, academic research and local knowledge, with no integrated way to connect colony health, honey production, pollination, environmental conditions and rural economic opportunity across regions.
Overview
I was responsible for the field data structure, turning observation forms and interview questions into something consistent and trackable. That structure evolved once field interviews began surfacing things the forms could not fairly quantify. Deciding what to standardize and what to preserve as a written note became a recurring judgment call throughout the project.
The interviews were conducted in Spanish. Beekeepers described hive conditions, management practices, pesticide concerns, and forage in their own terms, which rarely mapped cleanly onto the categories we had created. I was also interviewed in Spanish for a short video aimed at Peruvian youth and young beekeepers.
Separately, I organized national agricultural and apiculture datasets into a data dictionary and structured the data at the department, province, and district levels. This allowed me to compare public figures with what we were observing on the ground.
Bee tourism was not part of the original scope. Field visits made it clear that Peru already had many of the necessary pieces: diverse bee systems, knowledgeable hosts, and existing tourism infrastructure. What was missing was a system connecting them. I developed the research track independently by reviewing more than sixty sources, benchmarking models across seven countries, and proposing a pilot model for the Cusco region.
Gallery(5)
With a beekeeper in the Manú Amazon eco-region. Stingless bee honey, Quillabamba. Being interviewed for a short video aimed at young beekeepers, San Miguel de Acos. Moving field sheets into the working spreadsheet, Quillabamba. With Centro Bartolomé de las Casas (CBC) in Cusco, on the environmental challenges facing agriculture.
What came out of it
DocumentJul 2026International Models for Bee Tourism
A comparative research report on how bee-tourism and rural-tourism models abroad handle certification, visitor readiness, destination integration, sustainability and regional identity — and which of those lessons transfer to a possible apitourism model in Peru. Written in Peru under the supervision of Dr. Carol Fassbinder-Orth, Creighton University.
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