Abstract
Stingless bees (Hymenoptera, Apoidea, Meliponini) are the most biodiverse group of social bees with more than 605 formally described species inhabiting the tropics. Protecting their biodiversity sounds challenging. A team work for humans in close contact with stingless bees: Those who take care of them in meliponaries, and dedicated multidisciplinary scientists, merging the best ancestral to innovative knowledge. The Scopus database was used for the first bibliometric study on conservation of stingless bees for most productive authors, institutions, countries, and sources, since 2000. A total of 359 documents were retrieved from 141 sources, published by 1463 authors in English (348), Spanish (10), Portuguese (6), Chinese, Indonesian and Thai (1), from 58 countries, no single-authored, citing 2350 references. Most productive authors and affiliations are from Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. With its participation in 11 and 12 documents and impacting the
theme with the most globally cited document, the United States and Brazil emerged as the leading producer of scholarly works. A steady growth on scientific publications on conservation of stingless bees reached maximum of 46 documents in 2024 and 44 in 2025. Bibliometrix was used to visualize our dataset in graphics on most cited documents, collaborative map, cloud of authors’ keywords, the most cited countries, multivariate analysis topic dendrogram plot which classified authors’ keywords in four clusters on: 1. Biodiversity loss (deforestation and climate change), 2. Stingless bee and honey, plant diversity for melissopalynology, distribution, pollen, and Heterotrigona itama, 3. Bee diversity, and 4. Pollination and pollinators’ ecological service needed to maintain biodiversity, including the most biodiverse stingless bee genus Melipona. Our review underscores policy advances and prospects for sustainably harnessing stingless bees, their active biomaterials, and microbiomes alongside the legal frameworks that support their conservation in Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Philippines, and Tanzania.