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Abstract

Nomadic or transhumant beekeeping in Greece is a longstanding practice that involves the seasonal movement of apiaries across a wide range of landscapes and microclimates, in alignment with floral and seasonal cycles (Mavrofridis et al. 2023). These practices play vital roles in pollination, biodiversity, rural economies, and food security. However, the rising frequency of climate-related events such as droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and flooding, along with the impacts of austerity and regulatory pressures, now threaten the viability and future of nomadic beekeeping. Collectively, these pressures are part of simultaneous, overlapping crises that can be conceptualized as “polycrisis” (Henig and Knight 2023). Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and 25 semi-structured interviews with nomadic beekeepers, beekeeping association representatives, and apiary scholars in northern Greece, I explore in this thesis how climate change, economic crisis, and neoliberal governance frameworks affect the feasibility of their livelihoods and their ecological and cultural practices. I employ a political ecology framework and multispecies ethnography to examine how value, care and labour are produced and undermined within the context of Greek nomadic beekeeping. Current political and economic systems privilege standardized, technocratic, and profit-driven models of agriculture and apiculture, which systematically devalue relational, care-based, and place-based ecological practices developed through long-term, sensory engagement with honeybees and in alignment with changing landscapes and seasons. Hence, I argue that despite the high international reputation of Greek honey, nomadic beekeepers occupy a structurally marginalized position without recognition or support, obscuring the livelihoods, relational care and labour behind it.