Presentation short abstract

This paper examines beekeeping in South Korea’s largest black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) honey forests as a honey-flow commons, showing how mismatched movements of state, humans, and bees generate distinctive regimes of access, conflict, and obligation.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes beekeeping in South Korea’s largest black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia, locally known as “acacia”) nectar forests, located in North Gyeongsang Province, as a field of “commons politics” produced by non-coincident movements of state, humans, and bees. First, it traces how, in the wake of the Korean War, the state planted fast-growing black locust to stabilize devastated hillsides, unintentionally creating extensive nectar landscapes that later became the basis for local festivals, regional specialties, and rural livelihoods. Second, it examines how bees’ aerial foraging overrides land-ownership boundaries that are strictly enforced for humans. While placing hives inside privately created nectar stands is not permitted, it is common practice to set hives on nearby fields, yards, or public land and allow bees to collect nectar from privately owned forests; in such cases, compensation goes not to the owners of the nectar forest but only to those who host the hives on their property. Third, the paper follows seasonal migrations of mobile beekeepers from regions where large nectar forests are scarce into this black locust zone, showing how they are framed not simply as mobile beekeepers but as predatory or “worse” users of the commons. These moral judgments reveal how interregional conflict shapes ideas of legitimate access to honey as a commons. By tracking these intersecting movements, the paper reconceptualizes beekeeping as a multispecies practice that exposes frictions between property, mobility, and more-than-human ecologies in contemporary South Korea.