Cercando il miele

(AP Photo/Rebecca Blackwell)

In this March 21, 2010 photo, Oskar Biteye, an Mbuti pygmy boy, climbs a tree along with other Mbuti men to retrieve honey, a prized delicacy, from a bees’ nest more than 150 feet up, in the Okapi Wildlife Reserve outside the town of Epulu, Congo. Smoking leaves, bundled with a burning ember, are pulled up on an adjacent vine, will be used to subdue the bees before reaching in to remove the honeycombs. The pygmies’ traditional practice of hunting bushmeat has devolved into an all-out commercial endeavor - staged not for subsistence, but to feed growing regional markets. The result: the forests, those that remain, are growing emptier by the day.