Beekeeping research

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Different honeybee management practices impact honeybees and wild pollinators in different ways. Similarly, different beekeeping / land management policies and practices impact beekeepers in different ways. Having built a beekeeper-researcher partnership based in SW England, I am facilitating this partnership to design, undertake and analyse fieldwork to explore what ‘sustainable beekeeping’ means, and how we can/should translate this into action. 

Spanning the disciplines of ecology and politics, and supervised by Professor Juliet Osborne (pollination ecology), Dr Karen Scott (politics),  Professor Stefano Pascucci (business studies: sustainability) and Dr Christoph Grüter (University of Bristol: social insect behavioural ecology), we aim to:

• Understand and characterise beekeeping perspectives and narratives in the UK; investigating motivations, values and power relations, and how these are produced and perpetuated.

• Characterise 'pathways to sustainability' that represent the diversity of beekeeping perspectives.

• Influence policy and governance procedures, and feed back to beekeepers nationally. 

What do you think? Which factors (economic, ecological, political, social) are most important to you with regard to the sustainability of beekeeping? Please complete the survey below.

My first paper "Motivations underpinning honeybee management practices: A Q methodology study with UK beekeepers" was published in Ambio (A Journal of Environment and Society) in 2022.