Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This talk examines the extent to which using the English-language terms “commoning” and “commons” to describe efforts to conserve a Carpathian honeybee type in Western Ukraine’s Kolochava Territorial Hromada illuminates and obscures participants’ practices, relations, intentions & desired outcomes.

Paper long abstract

Carpathian bees, one of three “aboriginal breeds and populations” according to Ukraine’s beekeeping law, are conserved in Transcarpathia Oblast by underpaid and unfunded researchers from the Prokopovych Beekeeping Institute. Because queens mate in the air with many drones from other colonies several kilometers from their nests, complex more-than-human “voluminous socialities” (Richardson 2025) are involved in arranging three-dimensional breeding spaces in order to maintain evolutionarily distinct types and “improve” them so that that commercial beekeepers will buy them. The unfunded Kolochava Territorial Hromada conservation project arose out of researchers’ and mountain beekeepers’ disputes with a prominent commercial beekeeper about how to breed Carpathian honeybees, and their recognition that they needed to collaborate to “dehybridize” bees and re-establish a type of Carpathian lost the 1990s.

Drawing on ethnographic research with these researchers and beekeepers between 2019 and 2025, I describe specific moments in the three-dimensional practices of rearing, mating, sampling, measuring, sharing, and circulating queens, worker bees and drones to specify what is being “commoned” in the KTH project, and where and when commoning occurs. While concepts of “more-than-human commoning” (Bresnihan 2016) and “common pool resource” (Ostrom 1990) capture certain elements of this process, their meanings, politics and affective charges do not map precisely onto Ukrainian terms used locally for “commons.” Some researchers and beekeepers, meanwhile, dream of greater state support (funding, law enforcement) and market demand for queens, both of which could undermine the fragile successes achieved thus far amidst a global pandemic and russia’s imperialistic war against Ukraine.