“One cannot work with bees and think of anything else:” Exploring Dynamics of Care for Women Beekeepers

With the emergence of modern beekeeping, beginning with the patenting of the Langstroth hive in 1852, publications focusing on beekeeping practices became increasingly popular. Along with publishing pieces examining the evolving techniques of beekeeping, many of these publications included articles that investigated women and beekeeping. In most of these articles, beekeeping was positioned as an appropriate activity for women, with justifications including the supposed intrinsic ability of women to understand and nurture honey bees and, also, the ability of beekeeping to offer an alternative from the normal drudgery that shaped much of typical women\u27s work. In this presentation, I use these early articles as a launching point to consider beekeeping as an embodied practice that is situated in an evolving interplay between social, cultural and economic human-animal interactions. To augment this historical data, recent interviews with women beekeepers working in Kentucky will be included to highlight the contemporary importance of examining the relational dimensions of human-honey bee encounters as beekeepers continue to contend with the modern precariousness of honey bee health. Through this linkage of historical and contemporary data on women beekeepers this presentation will theorize an ethics of care and responsibility for beekeeping that pulls from recent work in feminist theory and animal studies