Abstract
With growing awareness of a crisis in pollinator health, the practice of urban hobbyist beekeeping has grown in Canada with practitioners arguing that this activity can help to foster healthier honey bees and more mindful beekeeping practices. However, urban hobbyist beekeepers have been critiqued for encouraging improper beekeeping practices and over-saturation of honey bees in cities. Drawing on a multispecies ethnography based in London, Ontario and Toronto, including participant observation with the Toronto Beekeeping Collective and the London Urban Beekeeping Collective and interviews with 26 urban beekeepers, I argue that urban hobbyist beekeepers develop a sensuous and embodied relationship with honey bees that typifies playful work. By integrating participant perspectives with social reproduction theory, I demonstrate that the playful work of urban hobbyist beekeeping allows practitioners to engage with non-human nature outside of the constraints of capitalist labour regimes, enabling the expression of delight, enchantment, and curiosity. This relationship between beekeepers and honey bees encourages the development of bee-centred practices in which the preferences and physiological needs of the bees are consciously put ahead of the needs of the beekeeper. The possibility for honey bee flourishing is increased significantly when bee-centred beekeeping is coupled with integrated pest management.
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Notes
I do this with the recognition that there can be no absolute definition between hobbyist and small-scale beekeepers: the divide is simply too fuzzy in some instances, and even OMAFRA definitions vary depending on the criteria they set for grants or information gathering. Yet while there is a difference that is worth indicating between hobbyist and small-scale beekeepers, at the same they tend to share many common practices that sharply distinguish them from large-scale commercial operations, and this is why I interviewed both types of beekeepers.
In the beekeeping community, the characteristics of the colony are attributed to the genetics of the queen and, a lesser extent, the drones with whom she mates. Queen breeding is based on careful selection of mating queens from colonies that exhibit traits desired by beekeepers. Few urban beekeepers are bee breeders due to the inability to maintain separate mating apiaries. While the scientific language and processes may get diluted when used by laypeople, this way of discussing queens and colonies is very common from honey bee scientists to hobbyist beekeepers (Borst 2015).
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This article draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The author would like to thank the reviewers for their insightful feedback.
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Ellis, R. Social reproduction, playful work, and bee-centred beekeeping. Agric Hum Values 39, 1329–1340 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10319-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-022-10319-0