ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the lively materialities of the work of honey bees and their keepers in New Zealand's Bay of Plenty. It concentrates attention on the box of bees by narrating two encounters with everyday apicultural practices and their political and ecological economy that were staged as part of that research: being in the shed constructing Langstroth hives, and being with those hives in the field. The chapter deploys the playful metaphor of speaking bees to confront the ontological status of bees and develop a post-human account of apiarian potentiality. It points to the intra-activity of social and natural agencies encountered in the banal work of building and managing hives and to how bees consequently emerge through the resulting entanglement of matter and meaning. The chapter demonstrates that, in coming to know and do bees, beekeepers articulate and perform situated and codified understandings that emerge from embodied practice, as well as performative in situ rationales of science and/or economics.
