Conversations with Insects: Participatory Action Research with Bees

Our second workshop took place on the 31st May and 1st of June at Pershore College in Warwickshire. After exploring participatory design in our previous workshop , we used this event as an opportunity to think through the possibilities of doing participatory action research (PAR) with non-humans. During the development of our proposal we had been excited to find Peter Reason (a key proponent of PAR) arguing that an important area of development for the field would be to find ways of operating within a context of more-than-human communities (see this post). So this workshop allowed us to take some very preliminary steps towards addressing this challenge.

For this event, the research team worked with members of the Evesham Beekeepers Association and the Vale Heritage Landscape Trust to get a better understanding of the practices of honeybee-keeping and of bee-friendly landscape management. We were also joined by Adam Bates from Birmingham University who provided us with insights into a wider range of bees and insects, and Dave Roberts, a bee-keeper from Liverpool who works with NHS service users and a great local health initiative Squash Nutrition.  Part of the reason we wanted to work with bees in this series of workshops was because of the increasing role they are playing in local community health and development initiatives. Bees thus provide a very clear example of the role non-humans play in efforts to strengthen communities and could also be seen as important actors within some of the issues that our funding stream, Connected Communities, seeks to address. So it was great to have Dave there to share his experiences of working with bees in this way.

In keeping with the action-oriented method of participatory research, we spent our first day getting involved in a variety of activities led by our workshop hosts. Our morning session was facilitated by Richard Toft who first gave us an overview of beekeeping, the roles bees perform over the course of their life-cycle, the equipment used, and how a colony is managed over the year.  We then went out to meet the bees and spent the rest of the morning visiting the hives, where we saw the queen, brood cells and a waggle dance.

In the afternoon we visited a heritage plum orchard at Hipton Hill which is managed by the Vale Heritage Landscape Trust. Our aim was to get a better sense of the kinds of foraging environments that were once more widely available for bees and are currently under extreme pressures. The orchard is well-known locally because of the very high number of orchid varieties that grow there, and although we didn't see any Bee Orchids, there were some beautiful Butterfly and Spotted Orchids in flower. We also had a range of encounters with other non-humans. Adam Bates introduced us to some of the flying insects at the orchard, including some solitary bees. Near the existing hives at the orchard we noticed a swarm and so saw the process of catching a swarm and introducing it to a new hive-box. Then later, while we were hard at work pruning back the plum trees we spotted something that looked like a cross between a fawn and a puppy asleep in the long grass (a Chinese Water Deer?) and so moved our work to a different area so as not to disturb it.

For our final session we then started to reflect on how we might bring some of our experiences from the day into a PAR framework. We had prepped for the meeting by reading the PAR Toolkit created by Rachel Pain, Geo Whitman, David Milledge & Lune Rivers Trust (available here [PDF]) and so we started to think through how its description of PAR (see to the right) might apply to a potential project with bees. The key question was how might bees take a leading role in producing and using knowledge about a particular issue?

"Participatory Action Research involves people who are concerned about or affected by an issue taking a leading role in producing and using knowledge about it."

So we had some prompts to help us think through the variety of issues at stake, we discussed the 7 themes the PAR toolkit proposes that participants should engage with as a PAR project progresses: collaboration, knowledge, power, ethics, building theory, action, emotions and well-being. As with our dogs workshop, our discussion revolved mainly around issues to do with collaboration, knowledge and power. For example, we asked how do conversations between bees and humans take place? You could argue that bees are already communicating simply through their rapid change in population numbers, but they also communicated more directly through sound, (from calm to agitated), smell (the beekeepers amongst us said they could smell when a hive was becoming more agitated) and also warning threats (people and lawnmowers for example) by deliberately bumping into them.

We also asked what kinds of choices do bees make and when are they able to make them? A key example was when bees choose where they will create a new hive. We wondered whether this might a good site to explore participatory methods?  Many of us knew Thomas Seeley's work on swarming, which suggests that bees actually engage in a democratic, consensus building process when decided where a swarm will settle. Given that we had just seen a swarm being captured there were lots of questions about the ethics of interrupting this process for our own benefit. A key issue in terms of research would be what kind of choices would the bees have to engage in a project or not. As Clara Mancini suggested, for something to count as participation those involved must be able to withdraw at any time, if they can't the research should then be classified as animal experimentation.

As with our previous workshop, we spent Day Two focusing more explicitly on the details of the particular method we were exploring. Using a similar approach, we tried out a cut-down version of the process to see what kinds of issues would arise when attempting to include bees as participants. The case-study of working with the Lune River Trust in the PAR Toolkit was particularly useful for this and gave us a sense of which key steps we should explore.

First we had to decide what issue the research would focus on. So we divided into small groups and developed lists of issues of current concern. Here we tried to differentiate the concerns of beekeepers and other humans from those that the bees might have themselves. We ended up identifying nine key issues that were collated into five themes:

1. landscape management
2. co-responsible bee-keeping
3. public image/co-habitation
4. nutrition
5. over-wintering

A quick tally of votes led to a narrowing down of these themes to two main topics that we then discussed for the rest of the morning: co-responsible bee-keeping and public image/cohabitation. For each of these topics we asked a number of questions, again using the PAR toolkit as a guide. First who would be involved in exploring this issue and whether they are representative of wide group affected by issue? Second, what different kinds of knowledge are important, including which outside ‘experts’ would be needed (could this include other animals/insects/plants etc)? And finally what research methods could we use?

The co-responsible beekeeping group had some very interesting discussions around the dynamics of the beekeeping community itself and the difficulties of having discussions between those who advocate contrasting approaches. They also identified a need for beekeepers to learn from some of the new approaches to agriculture and horticulture that are adopting a less industrial approach. The co-habitation group were particularly interested in the issue of bees in urban areas, which can often provide better forage for them, but also brings with it the issue of people liking bees in the abstract but not so much when they are living in the backyard next door! They explored the possibilities of engaging urban dwellers more closely with bee populations and using various interactive technologies to build affinities in humans for bees in ways that were safe for both parties. To conclude we returned to the 7 themes identified in the PAR Toolkit to see how our discussions throughout the day might have shed further light on the possibilities of PAR with bees.

Thanks to Pershore College, Evesham Beekeepers Association and the Vale Heritage Landscape Trust for enabling the workshop to happen and for sharing their insights so generously. Special thanks to Phil Jones for organising the workshop.

Workshop attendees with members of the Evesham Beekeepers Association after our visit to the hives