Tanya Richardson at Institute of Ethnology, April 24. at 3pm 

Institute of Ethnology AVČR, Na Florenci 3, Praha 1, 5th floor. 

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Voluminous Socialities, Scientific Capacity, and the Making of Carpathian Honeybee Territory in Ukraine and Beyond   

According to honeybee researchers from Ukraine’s Prokopovych Beekeeping Institute, Carpathian honeybees in the Transcarpathia Region have long been at risk of disappearing because of hybridization with other kinds of honeybees. Yet the large-scale reproduction of Carpathian bees by a state farm during Soviet times and by Institute-based and private breeders in independent Ukraine, means that they now have many “diasporas” (Ogden 2018) close by (Moldova) and far away (Siberia, Central Asia, Canada). These “diasporas,” however, are dependent on receiving Carpathian bees from Transcarpathia and therefore on under-funded institute-based researchers who have conserved “pure” Carpathian bees. Preventing hybridization in honeybees is particularly challenging because of their haplodiploidy and queens’ aerial, polyandrous mating practices; it requires spatial arrangements attentive to ground-air relations, or what geographers and anthropologists call “volume” (Bille 2020, Jackman et al 2020). Drawing on ethnographic research with beekeepers, breeders, researchers and their bees in Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Canada in 2018-2022, I make visible the voluminous socialities through which Carpathian honeybee territory and researchers’ scientific capacity have been made in order to show why they persist in spite of economic crises and the Russian-Ukrainian war.  

Tanya Richardson is an anthropologist based at the Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Kanada.