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Paper short abstract

Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with nomadic beekeepers in northern Greece, this paper shows how their long-standing, adaptive practices of multispecies care and embodied knowledge become precarious as overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises converge.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on three months of ethnographic fieldwork with nomadic beekeepers in northern Greece to explore how overlapping political, economic, and ecological crises influence multispecies relations. Greek nomadic beekeepers continue a long-standing practice of seasonal mobility in search of favourable foraging and overwintering sites for their apiaries; however, today they operate under conditions of “polycrisis” (Henig and Knight 2023). State neglect and market pressures converge in environments affected by climate change, including droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and floods, disrupting the traditional beekeeping calendar and the social reproduction of nomadic beekeepers. Using multispecies ethnography alongside a political ecology framework allows for an examination of how their embodied, situated knowledge gets devalued within bureaucratic systems of neoliberal governance. The adaptive practices of nomadic beekeepers, grounded in centuries of mobility, sensory apprenticeship, and artisanal passion, known as the local value of meraki, are now under threat. Those who remain in the profession do so by taking risks, creating solidarity networks among themselves and actively resisting exploitative notions of capitalist efficiency. Here, multispecies care becomes inherently political. Nomadic beekeeping in Greece promotes ecological sustainability and supports multispecies livelihoods through transportable pollination services and demanding labour, but lacks political and economic backing and protection. Meanwhile, current economic systems enable the extraction of surplus value from both human and more-than-human bodies through commodification processes. Thus, I argue that although Greek honey is internationally valued, the nomadic beekeepers who produce the honey in collaboration with honeybees and landscapes remain socio-politically and economically marginalized.