Paper short abstract:

Encounters between researchers, bees, beekeepers in Transcarpathia, Ukraine at different times between 1920 and 2023 are narrated in order to reflect on the challenges of doing environmental research about Ukraine that captures its distinctive histories and disrupts imperial & colonial relations.

Paper long abstract:

Research about honeybees in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia Oblast, together with the bees themselves and their researchers, have a complicated history of being enrolled in colonial, imperial, and postcolonial projects. While in the 1920s Czechoslovak researchers were likely the first to identify an autochthonous, alpine population of bees as potentially valuable for industrial beekeeping, it was in the 1960s that professors from Moscow’s Timiriazev Agricultural Academy, enchanted by bees’ gentleness, mobilized the funds and researchers to identify the bees as “Carpathian” and create the infrastructure to conserve and reproduce them for distribution across the Soviet Union. In 1989, Ukraine’s newly established Prokopovych Beekeeping Institute became the centre of researching Carpathian bees and incorporated Zakarpattia-based researchers. With ever-diminishing resources, researchers became commercial breeders and sold their queens in Ukraine and abroad (e.g. Moldova, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and most recently Canada) to sustain themselves and the institute’s research program. Recently, however, Ukrainian beekeepers’ enchantment with other kinds of bees from Austria and Germany, has complicated researchers’ conservation work and undermined their epistemic authority, a situation the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine exacerbated. Enter a (Ukrainian-) Canadian anthropologist who researches Ukrainian researchers researching Carpathian bees. This paper narrates encounters between researchers, bees, beekeepers, and landscapes at different times to reflect on some challenges of doing environmental research about Ukraine that simultaneously captures its distinctive histories while disrupting imperial and colonial relations that peripheralize or occlude them.