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Paper short abstract

This paper explores ethical and epistemic issues arising from smart-hive technologies in honeybee colonies. Using an enactivist framework, it examines the human-bee-technology triad and asks how technological mediation may reshape multispecies mutualism and introduce new forms of asymmetry or harm.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ethical and epistemic implications of introducing technological interventions –such as smart-hives, similar to those developed in the Hiveopolis project – into honeybee colonies (Apis mellifera). These systems, which combine robotic structures with artificial intelligence, promise to improve colony health, enhance monitoring of environmental stressors, and open new possibilities for sustainable apiculture. Under these conditions, technological mediation is expected to support the wellbeing of both species.

Drawing on enactivist approaches to cognition, the paper treats cognition and ethics as co-emergent within organism-environment relations. From this perspective, questions of care, responsibility, and intervention cannot be understood as external moral evaluations but are embedded in the very structure of multispecies interaction.

This paper investigates the potential for mistreatment of the actants (particularly bees) within a triadic relation which consists of humans, bees, and technology. It offers a contribution to STS debates on more-than-human care and multispecies entanglements, showing how technological mediation can shape mutualistic relations between humans and animals.