Title: Beekeeping, stewardship and multispecies care in rural contexts
Summary: Beekeepers’ knowledge and practices are relevant to other actors engaged in supporting interspecies relationships of care in rural society. This research explores how beekeepers care for their bees, notions of what it means to care and who is responsible for challenges to bee—and other species’—wellbeing.
The researchers show how beekeepers develop a deeply empathetic sense of bees and wider environmental vulnerability, which influence how they enact differing forms of care. Through their care for bees, beekeepers are embedded within rural societies, developing and applying a distinct knowledge and identity within their communities.
The research also explores beekeepers’ engagement with landscapes and landowners and the relationships and tensions within the beekeeping community and with other members of the rural community.
It is argued that beekeepers’ engagement with a specific semi-wild non-human species promotes human engagement with multiple species, as well as hitherto undervalued forms of knowledge about animal species.
The research is relevant to contemporary questions surrounding rural landscape management, including concerns about the impact of agrochemicals used in the food system, recent shifts in agricultural production that reflect the importance of non-honey bee pollinator species, as well as wider negotiations surrounding other species in an increasingly technocratically understood and managed rural landscape.
Maderson, S. & Elsner-Adams, E. (2024). Beekeeping, stewardship and multispecies care in rural contexts. Sociologia Ruralis, 64, 202–221.
