Digital hives, nonhuman work and the real subsumption of nature
Fixing pollination in capitalist agriculture
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 4464593 |
|---|---|
| Autores | Richie Nimmo (0000-0002-0249-7431, University of Manchester, autor correspondente) |
| Ano | 2025 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Fascículo | 3 |
| Páginas | 1112-1131 |
| Data de publicação | 2025-06-01 |
| Open Access | Sim |
| Tipo | ARTICLE |
| Periódico | Environment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Identificadores do periódico | ISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494 |
| Editora | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/25148486251336609 |
| OpenAlex | W4409721927 |
| Idioma | EN |
| Referências citadas | 56 |
This article examines the emerging technology of 'smart hives' which use sensors fitted to beehives to monitor and record multiple aspects of honey bees' activity along with various measures of the health and productivity of the colony. The data feeds analytic algorithms which can guide hive and pollination management, purportedly enabling improvements in pollination efficacy alongside reduced environmental impacts. In this way 'precision pollination' is hailed as an answer to the challenges of pollinator decline whilst ensuring food security in the context of climate change. Drawing from scholarship on capitalist orientations to nature, socio-ecological crises and fixes, and the 'real subsumption of nature under capital', this article outlines a political ecology of digital pollination, situating 'smart hives' in the context of the industrialisation of pollination. It argues not just that 'smart hives' mark a shift from the formal to the real subsumption of pollination under capital as a 'fix' for the socio-ecological crisis of commercial pollination services, but that this is underpinned by an intensification of the pollination work of bees in conjunction with the real subsumption of the labour of beekeepers. In this way it contributes to a multispecies framing of real subsumption which reckons with the role of shifting modalities of capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work
Appropriation · Biology · Context (archaeology · Political science · Pollen · Pollination · Pollinator · Scholarship · Sociology · Insect and Arachnid Ecology and Behavior · Insect and Pesticide Research · Law · Plant and animal studies · Ecology
Labor and monopoly capital
The World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting
Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers
Capitalism in the web of life
Langstroth on the hive and the honey-bee
Nonhuman Labor and the Making of Resources
Dairy Cows
Economic valuation of the vulnerability of world agriculture confronted with pollinator decline
Industrial Dynamics and the Problem of Nature
Beekeepers’ knowledges and participation in pollinator conservation policy
Where have all the flowers gone? Honey bee declines and exclusions from floral resources
Resource geographies I
Ecology Against Capitalism
The Robbery of Nature
There’s More Than One Way To Know A Bee
Following beekeeping
Value in capitalist natures
Animals, Work, and the Promise of Interspecies Solidarity
On the two contradictions of capitalism
The Bio-Politics of Bees
Value and Nature
Towards the socio-ecological fix
Fixing extraction through conservation
Replacing cheap nature? Sustainability, capitalist future-making and political ecologies of robotic pollination
The Plight of the Honeybee
Chicken Harvesting Machine
Metabolic Labor
Capitalism, nature, socialism a theoretical introduction∗
Capitalist Natures in Five Orientations
The Socioecological Fix
Clean communication
How to become a beekeeper
Invisible Work
Mechanisms of invisibility
From a free gift of nature to a precarious commodity
Ecologies of Empire
The Accelerating Biophysical Contradictions of Industrial Capitalist Agriculture
From extractivism to global extractivism
| Altamente citado | Não |
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