Chapter 17 - Framing Beekeeping, Environmental Change, and Adaptation in the Italian Alps. An Anthropological Perspective

This chapter wishes to delve into concepts such as assemblage (Tsing 2015) and sympoiesis (Haraway 2016; Tsing 2015) and examine them within the framework of my ethnographic fieldwork on beekeeping in the Western chain of the Italian Alps. I believe that the implications of notions such as sympoi- esis and assemblage can be seen to surface in the context of bee-beekeeping and bee culture, as they emerge as multi-species activities where everything and everyone involved can be regarded as a social actor. In this respect, the most relevant issues I would like to tackle are referred to knowledge production and know-how among beekeepers who keep their apiaries in the plains for most part of the year and move them to mountain areas for the summer.