Pollinators and Colonists in Eastern Central Asia

• In Event: Botanical Histories of Tsarist Central Asia and the Caucasus

Abstract

A lesser-known story in the imperial colonisation of Central Asia is the development of bee-keeping as a commercial and subsistence practice: in the province of Semirech’e alone, over 70,000 new bee hives, home to perhaps 4 billion bees, had been set up by incoming rural migrants by 1910. This paper explores the entwined history of human and insect colonists in the province in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In doing so, it traces political-ecological connections between southern Siberia, eastern Central Asia and the Caucasus; considers what apiculture can tell us about broader social and economic dynamics in the period; and reflects on apiaries as potential alternative archives.

Author

• Jennifer Keating, U College Dublin (Ireland)