The paper analyses the impact of the two most prominent elements of a traditional societ y in South West Ethiopia: institutionalized traditional beekeeping as main cash income source and high segregation of a society through a caste system, which marginalizes especially a certain huntergatherer group. Beside the high ecological value of the pollination services of beekeeping the traditional inheritance rights, where honey-bee trees are inherited from one generation to the other over centuries still have highly conservational effect on primary forests, also by increasing the opportunity costs of forest clearing through income generation from bee-keeping. However as the main factor of the economy is subsistence agriculture, it can be assumed that despite relatively high incomes from beekeeping the forests will decline further, nevertheless this tradition will help to retard this process, until alternatives could be generated. However, income from beekeeping is now threatened through ecosystem fragmentation through the spread of plantations and due to a decline of the pollinator’s population due to declining resilience of the traditional system itself. Moreover the discrimination and social exclusion of the huntergatherer groups from agriculture forces them into non-sustainable practices of hunting and fuel wood gathering for cash, as due to their exclusion this cannot be integrated into agriculture and leads to a perpetuation of their marginalization due to the extension of traveling and transport distances which increases malnutrition and vulnerability to diseases. Social exclusion moreover increasingly forces the groups among them, who are already in transition to agriculture frequently to abandon their plots.