A multi-species environmental sociology of beekeeping.

This is the blog for a social research project looking at bees, human beings, and all their intricate inter-relations and entanglements. It is not a practical beekeeping blog, although it will often refer to issues in practical beekeeping. Nor is it a purely theoretical blog, though it often refers to concepts from socio-material theory. Instead, it tries as far as possible to let the bees do the theorising – to humbly follow them as they trace their own uniquely fertile trajectories, interweaving not just plants and pollen, nectar and honey, but at the same time matter and meaning, society and nature, humans and nonhumans.

As beekeepers through history have found, close observation of the intricately organised activities of these most social of insects seems to promote a unique perspective on things, encouraging contemplative reflection upon the the nature of order, the order of nature and the nature of life. This project tries to grasp something of that encounter and to bring it into dialog with contemporary social thinking about humans, nonhumans, and the vital textures of multispecies life on this planet.

More detailed background to the project can be found here.