‘a good hive’: Diffractive Cosmopolitical Exploding of Worldly Apicultural Relations in New Zealand

Abstract

Apiculture has a diffractive historicity and vital materiality in which co-constitutiveness of human socio-technologies and the reproductive sociality of honey bees (Apis mellifera) have co-fabricated a complex and intra-active biological economy. In this thesis I examine key dimensions of this coconstitutiveness and show that the successful introduction of A. mellifera and their reproduction in New Zealand can be productively explored as a situated coming to know the world through its doing, specifically, a partial and noninnocent actualising of apiarian potentials. The diffractive methodology which I deploy to explore and analyse the diffractive historicity and vital materiality of apiarian relations is informed by a cosmopolitical and posthuman agential realism. I assemble rich affective accounts that, affecting accountability, engender and empower the work of coming to know and do ‘bees’ differently. These challenge the normativity of popular and scientistic accounts of apiculture and hive-related practices in New Zealand: how, why, and with what consequences has the situated and directed emergence of honey bees and apiculture in New Zealand occurred? This engagement accounts for how bees as participant in biological economies of co-constitutive fabrications have been enacted. I contend that this is the work of ‘a good hive’, the utopia of The Good Hive in which ‘we’ are invested. Key words: apiculture, diffractive methodology, cosmopolitics, posthuman agential realism, vital materialities