Since Virgil, there has been a discrete but constant association of beekeeping with some sort of epicurean wisdom. Living a frugal live in the quietness of Nature, far from the urban whirl of ...agitation, the beekeeper was supposed to experience the happiness of the philosopher detached from the world. This old vision, as illusory as it might be, seems to have encountered a new popularity in the contemporary novel. Many current writers tend indeed to depict beekeepers characters in their fictions as philosophing misfits, good-hearted wise men or anti-modernity fighters. This article tries to make an inventory of all these textual appearances and to define what could possibly be a beekeeper’s wisdom.
Two contemporary novels dealing with the beekeeper’s social type, Le Maître des abeilles by Henri Vincenot and Maxence Fermine’s L’Apiculteur, reshape the social representations which are linked with ...this character in an original way. We shall show how each novel proceeds to join external images to the collective ideas we commonly build to figure out the beekeeper’s tasks (either congruent or not with the reality of this job) in order to create a new literary universe. The representations (or even stereotypes) of the adventurer, for instance, or of the religious officiant give a new sense to the reading according to the poetical choice of the two writers.
Much more than a simple thematic figure, the beekeeper is, for the poet and art critic Jacques Dupin, the medium for a poetic game with the figures of the lyrical subject to renew our thinking on ...poetry. Thanks to a verbal materialism that both captures and provokes the encounter between the subject and the world, the wax produced by the beekeeper is equivalent to the page of the poem, on which the poem can be engraved, and nourishes the poet's lamp, who learns from the beekeeper an ethic conveyed by simplicity, humility, a taste for the essential, and an openness to the infinitesimal elemental world that is thus fully inhabited. By representing himself under the mask of the beekeeper and pursuing his swarm-poems and bee-words, Jacques Dupin encounters an authentic poetry that is fuelled by the transfer of the playful, moral and hermeneutic figure of the beekeeper to the critical figure of the poet. The posture, gesture and wisdom of the beekeeper thus promise the poet access to a fair knowledge of the things of the world, but also of the power of the poem. To look at oneself as a beekeeper and to confront the bee is also to look at oneself as a poet and to question the possibility of a renewal of lyricism in the poetry of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WRMSDs) lead to fatigue and decreased productivity in workers, resulting in the need for many affected individuals to seek medical treatment annually. ...Beekeepers, like other agricultural workers, are susceptible to WRMSDs due to the continuous demands of their work and the repetitive movements involved. Thus, the objective of this study is to determine the prevalence of WRMSDs and assess the level of risk associated with different postures among beekeepers to improve their musculoskeletal health. To achieve this, a cross-sectional study was conducted involving 33 beekeepers, consisting of two stages. Firstly, the Nordic Questionnaire was utilized to assess the prevalence of WRMSDs. Subsequently, the Ovako Working Posture Analysis System (OWAS) was employed to analyze and categorize the riskiest postures into four levels of corrective measures. The findings indicate that the most commonly affected areas were the back (51.5%) and waist (45.4%). The occurrence of WRMSDs in various body regions was significantly associated with the beekeepers’ years of experience and weekly working hours. Additionally, the prevalence of neck and back pain was significantly related to their body mass index (BMI). The OWAS postural analysis revealed that the back (36.75%) and arm (21.08%) regions required corrective measures as soon as possible (level III), while the back (26.47%) and legs (14.70%) fell under the category of corrective measures needed in the near future (level II). Combining the postural analysis results, 28.43% were classified as Action Levels (AL) II, 37.73% as level III, and 0.98% as level IV. This study demonstrates that WRMSDs are relatively common among beekeepers, primarily due to their extensive work experience and the adoption of awkward postures during their tasks. As a result, recommendations regarding ergonomics and physiotherapy are provided to alleviate pain and reduce the strain on critical postures.
•Beekeepers often experience Work-Related Musculoskeletal Disorders (WRMSDs).•The most commonly affected areas are the back and waist.•The OWAS analysis identifies risky postures, particularly for the back and arms.•WRMSDs are linked to experience; years and hours worked play a crucial role.•This study provides recommendations for better musculoskeletal health.
This article examines the literary representations of the beekeeper, and more generally of beekeeping, in three science fiction stories from the second half of the twentieth century and the early ...years of the twenty-first: Frank Herbert’s Hellstrom’s Hive, Wang Jinkang’s The Beekeeper (Yangfengren) and Maja Lunde’s A History of Bees (Bienes Historie). It shows that the figure of the beekeeper – or of the woman beekeeper – and the whole beekeeping environment are both literary and discursive matrixes, allowing for original narrative developments and interpretative readings, notably political and philosophical. Finally, it considers the evolution of these representations under the influence of the awareness of the environmental crisis and new ecological concerns.
In China, beekeepers generally remain in the shadows. Most are transhumant, and their rustic lifestyle and rudimentary tasks place them at odds with contemporary social norms, between the plant and ...animal world and the human community, strangers among their compatriots. In the eyes of a Chinese society that values the group, their existence remains associated with the image of poor, hard-working and solitary peasants, almost marginal, despite their genuine entrepreneurial commitment. In social representations, beekeepers are either folkloric or invisible, free and therefore suspect, and potentially exploitable. Drawing on contemporary literature, documentary and journalistic production, we will sketch out the contours of this little-known profession as seen by its Chinese compatriots.
In the second half of the 16th century, when the first naturalist works devoted exclusively to bees appeared, there was a proliferation of astonishing depictions of hives and swarms, which ...considerably renewed the imaginary world of beekeeping – a practice that was half-agricultural, half-spiritual. A pen-and-ink drawing by Bruegel the Elder, generally dated 1568, is particularly striking: it shows three beekeepers at work, whose facelessness is enigmatic. Earlier, between 1556 and 1568, the Flemish painter had shown an interest in the beekeeping motif: in particular his various representations of the Tower of Babel, whose gigantic honeycomb structure we shall examine. It seems to be part of a tradition that established a link between honey and language. At the end of the tour, as a hypothesis, we will present the painter as a beekeeper: does he not play this role, or even that of an entomologist, when he depicts with extreme precision the habits of human insects?
The bee is not an animal like any other. Remaining wild even when it may have seemed domesticated by accepting to be housed by man, it seems to naturally have the appearance of the most elaborate ...cultures, whether in the spontaneous organization of the hive evoking sophisticated human societies, or in the geometric perfection of the hexagonal cells of the rays displaying astonishing architectural talents. Furthermore, the two main products produced in the hive are not like the others either. Honey and wax, naturally free from any process of putrefaction without having to undergo the slightest transformation, appeared not only as linking nature and culture, but also as symbols of immortality. The bee, which already through its way of life unified the plant and the animal, blurs the limits between the animal and the human, while linking the latter to a form of “beyond”. These particularities of the bee are the basis of a considerable symbolic production which could only permeate those who benefited from it and took care of it, a symbolic dimension which should make it possible to deepen and go beyond a first duality between two images of the beekeeper, that of the greedy predator and destroyer of nature or that of the carer, breeder and protector. The bee being at the heart of the great existential questions, the beekeeper could be perceived not only as a producer of honey or wax, but as a passer, as one who, initiated by his foragers, could transmit to other humans an understanding of the mysteries of the world, such as the transition from chaos to the harmony of the cosmos, from nature to culture, the link between humans and the divine, between the earth and the sky. One of the first myths dedicated to bees depicts this dual function of the beekeeper, productive and symbolic; it is the story of Aristaeus and the disappearance of the bees as told by Virgil in the IVth Georgic. We see the hero Aristaeus, initiator of beekeeping, having to resolve (already) the first disappearance of bees, caused by his confrontation with the fusional couple that constitutes Orpheus the poet and the nymph Eurydice. This myth allows us to go beyond the simple opposition between a "good person", the protector of bees, and a "bad person", the greedy predator, the ideal beekeeper being the one who manages to reconcile the productive bee and the symbolic bee, work and poetry, Aristaeus and Orpheus.
This article considers the social drivers that shape beekeepers' lost access to floral resources, and how this contributes to honey bee and beekeeper vulnerability. Most large-scale beekeepers in the ...United States are migratory and depend on access to private land to produce honey and healthy bees—a surprisingly tenuous arrangement for producers who add over $17 billion to U.S. agriculture. This dynamic often places beekeepers in asymmetrical power relationships with both landowners and state entities that tend to favor property owners and farmers over migrant beekeepers. Consequently, land use policies often do not favor beekeepers or honey bees. Through three empirical cases in the Midwest, I show the varied processes and mechanisms that play a role in excluding beekeepers from floral resources. As beekeepers lose access to forage for honey production and face greater precarity, they increasingly turn to commercial pollination and manufactured pollen inputs—both of which can have negative impacts on honey bee health.
•Most commercial beekeepers do not own the land they need to produce honey.•Forage access is shaped by political, economic, social, and ecological processes.•The migratory nature of commercial beekeeping also contributes to lost access.•Exclusion from forage can have negative impacts on honeybee health.
