Paper short abstract:

Bees are probably the beings most affected by human exploitation of natural resources. The paper discusses the challenging of doing ethnographic research in beekeeping, and it discusses the opportunities offered by a multimodal approach to communicating the Anthropocene to a non-academic public.

Paper long abstract:

Honeybees — and bees in general — are often described as 'sentinels' of environmental health. In the past decades, the apparently inexplicable bee-losses all over the world, also known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has led media to talk about the 'bee-apocalypse'. While entomologists consider the phenomenon as a multi-factored disease connected to environmental contamination, loss of biodiversity and the spread of viruses, the sociologist Richie Nimmo (2015) has suggested that the CCD can be seen as a form of 'bio-resistance' to the 'Apis-industrial complex'. Whether we agree or not with the term 'Anthropocene' (Moore 2016) beekeeping seems to be one of the practices most affected by climate change, environmental pollution, and natural resource exploitation. Beekeepers advocate for better plans for environmental management, the ban of pesticides, and forms of green economy that respect the life of bees.

Based on the ethnographic research in beekeeping in Italy and Austria, the paper aims at showing how the challenges of doing research in beekeeping urge the anthropologist to seek new ways of doing research and to develop different methodologies to engage with a larger audience.

The paper offers a critical reflection on the meaning of using a camcorder for producing ethnographic material on beekeeping, and it discusses the forms of negotiation of expertise that lead to the development of the blog 'Abieris e abis' (www.fareapicoltura.net). Finally, the paper shows how these tools enable the anthropologist to develop an effective methodology for researching in a field affected by the Anthropocene condition.