Our second workshop took place on the 31st May - 1st of June at Pershore College. We worked with the Evesham Beekeepers Association and Vale Heritage Landscape Trust to think through how the participatory action research approach might be extended to working with non-humans. This is the third in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Owain Jones.

I was struck by the following:

On one hand the intimacy of the relationship between the keepers and the bees insofar as the frame system lets the keepers, in effect, see into the working of the colony, even to the extent of seeing into the cells, seeing the queen in action, etc.; and on the other the otherness, the alieness, that exists between ‘becoming bee’ and ‘becoming human’.

The frame system seems very important to me insofar at it serves the above purposes for the keepers, e.g. monitoring hive health, but it also serves the bees well (as far as one can tell) quite simply as a place to make home. The technologies and practices of bee keeping have been shaped by bee agency over time insofar as it is a process of material, technological and habitual relational feedback/evolution. This process can perhaps be reflexively and technically refined and accelerated in ‘collaborative’ work with bees. The notions of various forms of biosensors to gather colony feedback offers some potential here.

I was struck by the attention to material and spatial detail - the size of the opening into the hive, which way the hives face in relation to each other. Also by the sensitivity to bee practice (such as slow moments, not standing in the flight path), and the notion of bee welfare not only for instrumental reasons but also for ethical reasons. The extraordinary socio-spatial habits of the colonies in terms of sex, learning and swarming show a rich forum of geographical becoming (as all animals do).

Dogs can clearly develop close emotional bonds with humans, and two-way  communication. Through touch, sound, smell, and other senses, co-practice  is commonplace and well developed. (The shared mammalness of both, the co-evolution of both are just two reasons for this). The intimacy between bees and humans (if it does exist) is of a different order, but in some respects at least, is no less significant.

The notion of beekeeping as more of a highly contested art, with perpetual openness for continued learning, than a settled and agreed practice, speaks to the great complexity of not only bees as a species, but also bees as embedded in ecology, and bees as embedded in the social and the adapted landscapes of modernity.

The issue of the super-organism and individual is a real challenge to thinking about human bee relationships as it is to other swarm, heard and flock animals. The Cartesian settlement of the human individual makes this challenging. Individual bees transmogrify from one part/function  of the super-organism to another as they ‘grow up’.

If humans and bees are seen as agents in the (ecological) meshworks (Ingold) of life then we are already bound into conversations, perhaps, exchanges for sure, which have profound impacts on the flourishing (or otherwise), of both and of the meshwork itself.

In essence I think if we are to conduct conversations with bees we need the intermediaries of the experienced, empathetic, and open minded bee keepers. They are the ‘spokespersons’ that Latour feels are needed in the  ‘parliament of things’. But they are not ‘representing fixed positions or facts, but conjectures and possibilities', and as Dobson (2010), observes, such a redefined ecological form of politics (and science) requires the development of new ways of listening, as well as new channels of speaking.

Our second workshop took place on the 31st May - 1st of June at Pershore College. We worked with the Evesham Beekeepers Association and Vale Heritage Landscape Trust to think through how the participatory action research approach might be extended to working with non-humans. This is the second in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Phil Jones.

In the Goon Show, Eccles famously sang “I talk to the trees... that's why they put me away”.  Talking to beekeepers while trying to set up this workshop, I felt everyone was looking at me like I was a crazy person: “We want to talk to the bees and find out what they want us to research...”

Participatory Action Research (PAR), as a technique, displaces the expert power of the academic, working with different communities to identify issues of common interest, devise strategies to research these topics and jointly come up with solutions to problems.  Communities involved in PAR sometimes struggle to think of themselves as ‘experts’ and can be really intimidated by being asked to sit down and talk to academics.  I felt this was even harder when trying to apply PAR approaches to talking to bees – you have to convince people working with bees that you’re not joking, not crazy and that there’s something interesting to be gained by trying to ‘talk to’ bees in this way.

The most striking thing that came out of this workshop for me was how bees are ‘spoken for’ by other people.  Stories of bee extinction and various anthropomorphic representations of bees (including the knitted bee that I used as the logo for the workshop) make people generally quite sympathetic to bees.  But the reality of getting up close and personal with a hive – the noise, the need to stay calm and still while they crash and bang into your protective veil – can be quite scary at first.  The stories we tell about bees change how we engage with this species.  It seemed very productive therefore to flip this around and try to think about what the bees say.  Indeed, we ended up with some very interesting ideas for projects with this most sensitive of indicator species for general ecological wellbeing.  But even at the end of the second day I still felt a little bit like I was playing the role of crazy academic, having to apologise to non-academics (including the bees!) for the rather strange day out we were having...

As part of our exploration of how our ideas of community might be reshaped to include bees as active participants, Johan Siebers has written a lovely piece exploring the role of bees in philosophy and literature.

This includes analyses of Godfried Bomans' Erik of het klein insectenboek, Virgil's Georgica, and Mandeville’s Fable of the bees, or: Private Vices, Public Benefits.

Read an excerpt and download the full paper just below.

Part of being attentive to the possibilities of more-than-human participation in research is watching out for the ways that the traditional division between human agents and non-human subjects gets complicated in real life practices. I had been keeping this in mind throughout our In Conversation with Bees workshop, since we had quite a few discussions about different methods of beekeeping (e.g. frame versus natural) and how this might be interfering with bees preferred behaviours. But scattered throughout the two days were also a wide range of examples of how bees also shape the behaviour of the humans who keep them.

Interacting with bees makes humans:

1.       Calm down. It didn’t seem this way at first. When us amateurs where putting on our protective suits for the first time there was definitely some nerves. But we had been told about the importance of keeping calm and relaxed while inspecting hives and so we tried out best. Interestingly, in informal conversations many of the beekeepers also talked about how they looked forward to doing their inspections because of how calm the whole process made them feel. So while we did have examples of humans trying to control their own moods, there was also a more relational understanding where the activity of the bees also encouraged particular responses in the humans

2.       Become more attentive to whole ecosystems. One beekeeper discussed the way that since they had started, they noticed they were much more aware of the wider environment, including what trees and plants were being grown, whether they were flowering early or late, and cycles in the weather. Another also mentioned how important it is to be aware of the yearly rhythms of potential predators. So forging connections with bees seemed to have a knock on effect of building connections with a much wider variety of living creatures and plants.

3.       Develop multiplying practices. One of the first comments at our workshop was the saying that if you put 10 bee-keepers in a room you’ll get 15 different ways of doing things. I thought it was really interesting that bees, which are often used as symbols of regimented order, actually inspire a proliferation of practices and knowledges in the humans that keep them.

4.       More intelligent. In a Victorian-era book about encouraging bee-keeping amongst the poor, the author claimed that even while bee-keeping might not always be a success it should be encouraged because it makes people more intelligent.

5.       Continuous learners. Paternalism aside, there were many comments about the way the practice of bee-keeping meant that you were always learning more and so always needed to be open to the ways that bees don’t fit with strict models. 

6.       Drink less alcohol Bees don’t like the smell apparently, so bee-keepers need to moderate their intake, particularly the night before they do an inspection. I wondered how this might affect people’s social lives. Would one have to beg off from a night at the pub because the bees needed looking after in the morning?

A short film about our first workshop In Conversation with Dogs.