How to become a beekeeper: learning and skill in managing honeybees

Introduction

Beekeeping is a highly skilled activity with specific practices such as housing bees in artificial hives dating back centuries. ² While often regarded as ‘traditional’ or ‘old-fashioned’, beekeeping in the United Kingdom has experienced a surge of interest in the last 10 years, reflecting a wider societal awareness about the role of insect pollinators in human food provision. ³ Beekeeping is a rich site for research that has historically been predominated by natural science (biology, ecology, microbiology), although a growing number of geographers, anthropologists and social scientists have addressed the potential for beekeeping and honeybees to inform debates on the well-being of the earth, ⁴ the exclusion of non-scientists from policy and other discussions ⁵ and the more-than-human. ⁶ This article extends this social scientific enquiry to bring beekeeping into discussion with the growing fields of cultural geographies of education and the processes of enskilment.

This article contributes directly to recent interests in this journal and elsewhere to studying learning and education in non-school locations with non-child learners, ⁷ and with a broad empirical approach. ⁸ Specifically, it adopts Sarah Mills’ interest in training as a particular type of learning, which she describes as ‘often skills-based, staged, repeated, refined, observed, assessed’, ⁹ itself a response to an earlier piece by Holloway and Jöns calling for a greater focus on the ‘relationship between formal and informal spaces of education and learning’. ¹⁰ Learning to beekeep is referred to as ‘training’ by the beekeeping community and takes place across formal and informal, group and individual learning environments. In this article, I focus in detail on how these sites of learning interact with the process of acquiring the skills required to be a beekeeper. In doing so, this article contributes to the growing geographical literature on non-school learning environments and draws it together with existing work on enskilment ¹¹ and the role of communities of practice in supporting learning, ¹² and how engagement with an insect complicates these matters.

Furthermore, Colin Brock, a comparative education researcher, states that ‘Education . . . comprises just learning and teaching which are culturally based, but in its formal and non-formal modes at least it is politically delivered’. ¹³ The decline of honeybees and other insect pollinators has developed into a political controversy over the use of and effects of pesticides in agriculture that shows little sign of decreasing, ¹⁴ and there has perhaps inevitably been political engagement with the practices of beekeeping. The second aim of this article is thus to consider the wider political context in which beekeeping is being learnt in the United Kingdom, and to understand the influence of the wider societal context of the activity on the learning and enskilment process.

The following sections first position this article within the relevant literature on skill and geographies of education, as well as discussing the methods used to collect the empirical data on which this article is based. I then provide a detailed description of the learning process of novice beekeepers, before drawing this out to consider it in the political context of beekeeping in the United Kingdom, and offering some conclusions on the wider implications and relevance of this study.

Education, training, situated learning and skill: a renewed focus on ‘knowledge how’

Cultural geography has recently begun engaging deeply with both education and skill, notably through this and a previous Special Issue in this journal. The interface of these two areas of work is exciting, drawing together the geographical interest in spaces of learning with the anthropological intimacy of ethnographic research to capture skill and the interest of education studies in the political and social context of education and learning.

Geographers have engaged with education since the 1970s, ¹⁵ although cultural geographic engagement with education is relatively recent. ¹⁶ In writing and research about education, it is typically presented as rational, ¹⁷ fundamentally knowledge-based and dependent on institutions such as schools, universities and adult education colleges. ¹⁸ The rise of formal schooling has created a binary relationship between knowledge learnt formally via an institution (typically highly valued due to linkages with social mobility ¹⁹ ) and knowledge acquired informally, with an assumed devaluation of this latter knowledge. ²⁰ In turn, this sets up a gap between learning and use, characterised by the ‘knowledge of’, or context-free general understanding from formal education, and ‘knowledge how’ or context-bound understanding from informal education. ²¹ In an essay on the potential of geography and education, Thiem notes that as a result of these assumptions, much geographic and education studies enquiry has focused inward on issues around formal schooling – the provision and consumption of education, the effects on education of processes such as deindustrialisation and globalisation and more. ²²

Responding critically to this binary simplicity, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, social anthropologist Jean Lave and educational theorist Etienne Wenger developed the concept of situated learning. Through a series of case studies of apprenticeship, they focused attention on the importance of the social context in which learning and education takes place. ²³ Their focus on the acquisition of skills in non-school locations is increasingly resonant with an anthropological tradition of studies by authors such as Tim Ingold ²⁴ on the skills and knowledge held by indigenous people and thence into a wider research focus on practice and skill more generally. Ingold argues that skill is a form of knowledge and practice, both ‘knowledgeable practice and practical knowledge’, ²⁵ acquired through prolonged observation and immersion in practice rather than formal verbal instruction. This supports Lave and Wenger’s decoupling of the idea of learning from its common use to describe deliberate instruction (e.g. through school), instead regarding learning as an activity that takes place all the time, whether intentionally or not, and as part of social life, subject to the socio-cultural context and history of the individual learner. ²⁶

They particularly note that the context within which learning happens is important, as it is the context which dictates what is learnt and how. Their concept of a ‘community of practice’ considers how shared systems of meaning held by groups of people with a common interest can influence what individuals within those groups learn. Wenger ²⁷ suggests that participation in groups with a shared interest, such as beekeeping, is both an action (becoming part of and remaining a member of a group) but also becomes part of personal identity, shaping what people do and how they interpret what they do.

Grasseni ²⁸ extends the ideas put forward by Lave and Wenger about the importance of understanding how skills are acquired and shared with others through community and location, and by Ingold ²⁹ on the complex nature of ‘skill’ to include anthropological work on how the senses, particularly vision, are trained in ‘professional, scientific and everyday settings’ ³⁰ in particular ways described by a community. Grasseni focuses on ‘skilled vision’, noting that skill is not only linked to the process of observation with the eye but also ‘embedded in multi-sensory practices, where look is co-ordinated with skilled movement, with rapidly changing points of view, or with other senses, such as touch’. ³¹ These aspects of learning are highly situated and hard to reduce to abstract formulas, which have implications for efforts to deliver training as I will discuss in this article.

Crang ³² calls for cultural geography to ‘stitch together a dual concern with the mundane and trivial and with the remarkable and significant’. The drawing together of intimate ethnographic studies of individuals and their activities with the more organisational focus of Wenger’s work into corporate communities of practice ³³ has created a rich field of study for people interested in the process of skill and knowledge acquisition, with recent geographical studies on this theme drawing on the diverse contexts of taxidermy, ³⁴ vine cultivation ³⁵ and yoga. ³⁶ This study extends this line of enquiry, using a careful analysis of the ‘hive inspection’ to understand how beekeepers learn to engage with honeybees and become skilled and drawing out the effects of government interest in beekeeping education on this enskilment process.

Methodology

I carried out my empirical fieldwork in Lancashire between 2011 and 2013. Lancashire has a lively community of hobby beekeeping groups, organised geographically across the region, many of which are members of the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), an umbrella organisation that engages with national honey bee issues on behalf of local groups in England and Wales.

Several research methods were used to collect data on beekeeping skill and learning: semi-structured interviews (with 42 hobby beekeepers, 2 commercial beekeepers, 5 participants representing national beekeeping clubs and 6 people from the policy sector), participant observation (with 38 of the 42 beekeepers who had been interviewed, and 5 local bee clubs during both training and social events) and a personal field journal based on my own experiences of learning to beekeep. I also undertook one novice training course in its entirety during April–June 2011, permitting me to directly share the experiences of novice beekeepers and to compare different learning environments. Additionally, five beekeepers volunteered to keep a diary as part of my research during the 2011 beekeeping season. These diaries were coded and included in the analysis as first-hand reflections on the enskilment process as experienced by beekeepers. ³⁷ All interview and observation sessions were recorded, transcribed and coded for analysis.

Background to beekeeping

Beekeeping is a complex activity: beekeepers manage upwards of 10,000 individual honeybees in a single colony that is highly sensitive to environmental and seasonal changes and vulnerable to a range of diseases and pests. In the United Kingdom, bees are typically kept in moveable frame hives, wooden or polystyrene boxes between 15 and 30 cm high that can be stacked to allow colonies to expand or decline with the seasons, containing removable wooden frames within which the bees build their honey combs. This permits the beekeeper to look at every part of the colony with minimal structural damage to the combs. Hives are typically supported on stands and have a roof. The temperate climate of the United Kingdom means that beekeeping is highly seasonal, with colonies ‘over-wintering’ in a somnolent state and with a small population from October–February, and then starting to increase the number of bees in response to lengthening light hours and higher temperatures through the spring to a population peak in the early summer. During the active months, honeybees build stock-piles of honey and pollen to feed their colony and to support the colony during the winter.

Beekeeping activities can be divided into two sorts: those based in the apiary (the place where bees are kept, which can be anything from an urban garage roof to a field margin or open moorland), and those based elsewhere and which encompass everything from beekeeping club social events through to honey competitions. This article primarily deals with apiary-based activities, as this is the ‘core work’ of the beekeeper, without which none of the rest of the activities would happen. The complex honey bee ecology and the issues around handling thousands of flying, stinging insects mean that learning the practical aspects of keeping bees is the greatest initial challenge to becoming a beekeeper.

As mentioned in the ‘Methodology’ section, many beekeepers join beekeeping clubs. Most are run by volunteers, at both local and national levels, and are the main route to get formal instruction and informal support when starting to beekeep. There is also the National Bee Unit (NBU), a government body with responsibility for bee health, which provides advice and expert training on beekeeping, as well as maintaining a body of disease inspectors who are tasked with monitoring outbreaks of bee diseases and pests. Since the early 2000s, there has been a growing focus across the hobby beekeeping community and the NBU on beekeeper learning and education, in part due to new threats to honey bee health, and in part due to a report ³⁸ that indicated that beekeeping training varies in quality and availability across the United Kingdom, a concern because skilled management is vital for managing bee health, a key issue for honeybees. ³⁹ This report brought beekeeping stakeholders together through the Healthy Bees Plan (HPB), ⁴⁰ a collaboration that seeks to ensure that honey bee populations in England and Wales are ‘sustainable and healthy’. ⁴¹ This aim, and the challenges mentioned above relating to the actual handling of bees, underpins the rest of this article.

Inspecting bees: participation, model construction and visual training

Central to beekeeping practice is the ‘hive inspection’, a weekly or fortnightly careful dismantling of a hive, and close inspection of each frame. ⁴² It is the fundamental tool used by beekeepers to manage their colonies and, in the United Kingdom, takes place during spring–autumn. I use this activity as a way-in to understand how novice beekeepers learn to engage with a very different ‘other’, and how they develop the skills needed both to physically handle colonies and to manage the well-being of their bees. To do this, I draw on my own experience of this meaning-making process to illustrate the beekeeping learning process. However, the practices described here, and the activities undertaken, reflect a long tradition in UK beekeeping practice, captured in detail in widely used guides such as Hooper’s Guide to Bees and Honey which claims to be ‘the world’s best-selling guide to beekeeping’. ⁴³ Thus, while the descriptions here are personal, they are also drawing on the experiences of generations of other beekeepers.

Skill involves both mechanical technique and active engagement between the body and the environment, a process that is as much mental as it is physical or physiological. ⁴⁴ Learning a skill often involves novices watching a more experienced person doing the activity prior to actually engaging with it themselves, ⁴⁵ a process described by Lave and Wenger ⁴⁶ as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’. As a novice beekeeper undertaking participant observation, I joined an experienced beekeeper for an introduction to beekeeping at her home apiary:

Lisa, an experienced beekeeper, took up her position behind the hive and I got my first glimpse into a bee colony – a mass of small brown shapes moving rapidly over a series of wooden frames filled with wax comb. Lisa talked me through the inspection process, explaining what she was doing and why, and pointed out some of the easy mistakes people make. She took one frame and shook the bees off it before handing it to me saying ‘I’ll pass that to you so that you can see better’, and pointed out features of interest. (Field journal extract, April 2011)

Initially, interacting with honey bee colonies is confusing – you are clad in a protective suit, wearing gloves, with mesh over your eyes, and handling new tools and objects. In addition, there are bees flying around, buzzing, potentially stinging and there are thousands of individuals moving rapidly. Novices have to learn how to turn this ‘mass of movement’, ‘confusion’ and ‘apparent chaos’ ⁴⁷ (Figure 1) into meaningful understanding about their colonies.

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Figure 1.

A frame of bees. Although visually confusing to a non-beekeeper, experienced beekeepers can easily ‘read’ the activities of the bees, and draw from this an understanding of colony condition, and what management actions are needed to maintain the colony in good health. Learning to do this is time-consuming and requires both knowledge of honey bee ecology and careful observation of their behaviour at that moment in time.

When I visited Lisa, I participated peripherally in what she was doing by watching her handle the colony and occasionally being given something to hold or look at. Gieser ⁴⁸ suggests that observation and peripheral participation allows the learner to conceptually model and mimic the trainer’s motions prior to physical engagement. Scaffolding techniques can facilitate this, for example, where the learner’s hands might touch the trainer’s hands in order to experience a particular motion or sensation. ⁴⁹ This is particularly helpful in the case of beekeeping as you are handling live animals that sting if mistakes are made.

My second experience of beekeeping, with another experienced beekeeper called Jessica, was more directly participative in the work of a beekeeper:

As we stood inside the apiary, Jessica briefly described each colony, then approached one. She lifted the heavy lid, then invited me to inspect the colony. This was rather daunting but I agreed, and thought back to what Lisa had done and the conceptual model of beekeeping that I had built from watching her at work. I gently levered out the first frame and held it over the top of the hive. (Field journal extract, May 2011)

During this session, I handled every part of the hive myself as Jessica supervised, implementing in reality the conceptual model I had developed. However, the physical aspects of the learning process can be hard to teach, and trainers can often only encourage the learner to be open to the material context of the learning situation, rather than trying to directly pass on physical skills. ⁵⁰ Fugill ⁵¹ notes that language-based comments from trainers can enhance the learning potential for novices by pointing out things that they have missed, something Jessica employed to help me to see what I needed to and to move more confidently. For example, I found a queen cell (shaped like an unshelled peanut and pointing downwards on the comb), and Jessica said,

just tip it up and see if it has an egg in it . . . you might want to shine the sun into it, I turn my back to the sun and get a look in that way.

This tip made it significantly easier for me to inspect what was inside the cell, and also reassured me that I was able to move the frame in a particular way without damaging the bee larva inside. As the inspection proceeded and I handled more and more frames, the practice allowed me to become more confident and familiar with the physical skills required. ⁵²

The sensory aspects of a skill can be particularly difficult to teach, as ‘skill’ implies an assessment of quality, needing the practitioner to be attentive, perceptive and to have the capacity to monitor and adapt responses to the situation. This process is known as ‘the education of attention’, ⁵³ a gradual process of fine-tuning perceptions and actions in response to specific aspects of the surrounding environment. This sort of learning is incorporated by the learner, involving not only the body but also the mind and the environment they are in: ⁵⁴

My initial impression of the hive was chaotic. Jessica did two very helpful things: firstly, she asked me to describe what I could see. This forced me to look beyond the mass of moving insects and start looking at individual bees and the comb they were standing on. Secondly, she mentioned a checklist of 5-6 things that beekeepers look for in their colonies. She suggested that I work my way through the checklist, to see if I could see all of the things on it. ⁵⁵ (Field journal extract, May 2011)

Lists and categories can provide powerful organising frameworks for observation of the environment around practitioners. ⁵⁶ Goodwin suggests that members of a community share ways of delineating phenomena, and that this sharing of perception helps to create cohesion between the individuals within that community. ⁵⁷ The beekeeping checklist ⁵⁸ (see Figure 2) helped me both to organise visual chaos into something comprehensible and informative, highlighting and facilitating my attentive observation of important features while placing everything else in the background, and also ensured that I was thinking about what I could see from a management point of view (e.g. did the bees need more space, were there any signs of ill-health).

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Figure 2.

Annotated checklist of things to look out for when inspecting a colony, taken from a beekeeping guide. This checklist guides novice beekeepers by helping them distinguish the key features of a colony – which can otherwise be confusing to observe at first.

The combination of visual attuning, knowledge about the colony and bodily skills in learning to beekeep outlined here takes time to develop, but good teaching and demonstrating should encourage the novice to become ‘affected’ ⁵⁹ through observation and attunement of the perceptual capacities of novices – part of the ‘education of attention’ discussed by Ingold ⁶⁰ and a clear example of the dual physical-visual skill of Grasseni’s ‘skilled vision’. ⁶¹

Beekeepers are aware of this process of ‘articulation’, ⁶² employing the term ‘reading a frame’ or ‘reading a hive’ to describe inspecting a hive, assessing what to do, and constantly engaging eyes, bodies and minds to interpret what is observed – a process that, in the words of animal geographer Henry Buller, ⁶³ allows the bees to ‘speak’ to the beekeeper and tell them what is going on in the hive.

This section has explored in detail how novice beekeepers learn to understand a visually chaotic bee colony through a growth/development process of training the eye to spot relevant objects, training the body in handling hive parts and combining this with knowledge about colony function and needs to manage the colony. Perceiving beekeeping enskilment in this way links Ingold’s understanding of skill as being regrown in each new generation rather than ‘transmitted from generation to generation’ ⁶⁴ to Mill’s understanding of training as a specific sort of learning that is ‘repeated, refined, observed, assessed’. ⁶⁵ This training results in a form of ‘skilled vision’ ⁶⁶ that is demonstrated by experienced beekeepers who can swiftly ‘read’ a hive and understand what is going on inside it. Yet, how do novices access opportunities to develop their skills? This is discussed in the next section.

Transforming training into practice: formal and informal learning environments

Wainwright et al. call ⁶⁷ for a greater focus in geography on training spaces and their influence on learning skills. In adapting this to beekeeping, I map a transformative process where individuals move from learner to practitioner, a process requiring both multiple sites of learning and social interactions, without which novices struggle to learn. In the case study area, most novice beekeepers take a ‘beginner’ course in beekeeping prior to acquiring their first colonies – this can be understood as the ‘first level of access’ to beekeeping skill. Courses are typically offered by local clubs and differ in structure and form from intensive weekend courses to weekly sessions over several months. All involve groups of novices with a small number of trainers, usually one per demonstration hive, in an apiary that may be privately owned or may be a club-owned communal apiary (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3.

A beekeeping course for novices. Typically the practical part of training sessions consists of students grouped around a demonstration hive, with each student being allowed to handle a frame of bees for a few minutes. The numbers on the course necessarily limit the ‘hive time’ that each student is allowed, and emphasises the position of novices as ‘students’, passively watching but not undertaking much practical work.

In common with participants on other skill-acquisition courses, ⁶⁸ novice beekeepers in the study area often experienced restrictions on practical participation due to time and other constraints. This is important, because novices are on a trajectory from the outside to the inside of a community, a trajectory mediated by acquiring skills and knowledge relevant to the community. ⁶⁹ Training courses set up a formal learning environment designed to introduce the basic principles and components of beekeeping and consequently emphasise the position of the novices as learners. One effect of this formality is to keep novices on the periphery of beekeeping activities through an emphasis on watching and observing (helpful for building conceptual models) with occasional engagement. This is not a deliberate exclusion of novices but rather an inadvertent result of the constraints imposed by a formal course structure with a single trainer and multiple novices. The key point here is that because training courses can struggle to provide novices with ‘hive-time’, ⁷⁰ time spent handling and inspecting bees, linking observations with results and so forth, participants may in turn struggle to develop the ‘skilled vision’ which characterises skilful beekeeping, with implications for how novice beekeepers learn to deal with their own hives. One beekeeper captured the challenge of this way of learning well:

I learnt a lot at ‘bee school’, but I definitely learnt more with my own bees . . . Until the first time you lift the lid off and they all go ‘raagh’ at your face, you think you know enough. (Beekeeper interview 2011)

However, no matter how good the course, it is often only once a novice has moved to the ‘second level of access to beekeeping skill’, which I dub the ‘step to independence’, achieved by acquiring their own hive, that they can fully enact the ‘skilled vision’ of honey bee management, bringing together mechanical skills, knowledge about bees and an acquired sensitivity to their non-human partners in a context where they are entirely responsible for the well-being of their colony. Two first-year beekeepers who kept a research diary for me rapidly became aware of their limitations of their new-found skills, writing:

none of the books that we have read nor any of the information given during [our] training course prepared us for the eventuality of having to deal with artificially swarming or collecting swarms and this has proved quite stressful. (Beekeeper diary, 2011)

The quote above emphasises that the ‘step to independence’ and the associated transformation from trainee-novice in a group practising in an apiary owned and managed by others to solitary practitioner in a private apiary is often an anxious process. Although often ignored in education, ⁷¹ emotions can be both a useful learning mechanism (helping to focus attention and encourage information retention ⁷² ) but also problematic, as anxiety in particular negatively affects how people respond to and absorb new experiences. ⁷³ Skilled beekeepers are often very relaxed while beekeeping, balancing absorbed attention on things of interest (e.g. checklist items, see Figure 2) with observations of the whole, for example, the sound of the colony, the action of bees in the air, which combine to provide a ‘reading’ of the colony condition. ⁷⁴

In contrast, when faced with uncertainty in their home apiary without the expert guidance of a trainer, novices often favour established routines and protocols to guide their actions, ⁷⁵ which in the context of beekeeping can lead to disaster. One novice beekeeper recorded in her diary that she discovered unexpected queen cells in her hive. Queen cell building in a colony is usually a sign that either the colony is about to swarm or that the queen is injured or infertile, but each scenario requires very different management actions. The novice wrote,

In a panic I destroyed all QCs [queen cells] despite no eggs or sight of queen . . . really panicking as I realise my mistake and call for the expert – [mentor]. (Beekeeper diary, 2011)

Practising alone, the beekeeper followed a pre-learnt protocol from her training course to control swarming despite observing that there was no egg-laying, indicating that the queen was injured/infertile – an example of ‘overzealous learning transfer’. ⁷⁶ The consequences of incorrect management actions are particularly challenging for novice beekeepers, as the next inspection may not be for a week or more afterwards – a ‘gulf of evaluation’ ⁷⁷ that is sufficient for a colony to be seriously affected by a poor decision.

Furthermore, a common saying in beekeeping is that ‘bees don’t read textbooks’, because even experienced beekeepers can be surprised by their colonies. What makes the difference between skilled and unskilled beekeeping is how these situations are dealt with: sensitively, with acute observations and in a relaxed manner, or in a state of panic and with recourse to pre-learnt routines and textbooks. What we can see from this example is that once a novice is outside the formal learning environment of a course, they can struggle to develop their skills and consequently can make bad decisions. It is here that the strong social nature of beekeeping becomes important: although beekeeping is a solitary practice, the other members of local bee clubs provide a way for novices to gain support from more experienced beekeepers and thus play an important role in maintaining enthusiasm and commitment to the activity. ⁷⁸ The beekeeper in the quote above noted in her diary that following her error, she called on her mentor for assistance:

We went through [the colony] and she gave me good advice on technique. We were satisfied there was no queen. Found 2-3 emergency QCs and left them alone! Which is what I should have done previously. (Beekeeper diary, 2011)

Mentoring is a temporary engagement where the mentor provides practical and emotional scaffolding and support for novices as they move through a stage in their development towards being independent and autonomous. ⁷⁹ The mentoring process outlined by the beekeeper in her diary is the third level of access to beekeeping skill, a bridge between course-based formal learning (with its potential to not develop ‘skilled vision’ sufficiently) and the solitary home-based practice of beekeeping (with its responsibility and anxiety). The informal yet targeted training available via mentoring, in this case focused on identifying and managing the presence/absence of a queen, to support novices through the ‘step to independence’ is recognised locally and nationally, with the HBP and the BBKA producing materials for mentors and trainers to help them support novices. ⁸⁰ As the novice gains in skill, the need for mentoring decreases.

The issues facing novices as they take responsibility for their first hives emphasise the importance of recognising both the social context and the diverse environments in which people learn, a key aspect of the community of practice concept. ⁸¹ Becoming skilled, and moving along the trajectory from outside to inside a community of practice, is not just a matter of watching, thinking and doing in isolation, but is dependent on others and on recognising that a space such as the apiary can be transformed depending on how it is being used and the emotions of those in it. ⁸² Understanding this complexity is important when considering how to improve or change beekeeping training, as I discuss in the following section.

Conclusion: the consequences of formalising enskilment

The preceding sections have outlined a complex process of enskilment, through an analysis of the core beekeeping practice of inspecting bees and by outlining the process to move from novice to independent practitioner. This extends Phillips’ account of commercial beekeeping practice to present a more intimate account of novice beekeepers as they acquire skill. In this final section, I contextualise this detailed exploration of training within a political and cultural context, ⁸³ and thus contribute to Mills and Kraftl’s interest in the wider cultural politics of education. ⁸⁴ I also follow Crang’s recommendation for cultural geography to be alert to ‘energising tensions’, in particular, those tensions between the ‘small and the mighty’. ⁸⁵

A key theme in educational geographies is studying the effects of ‘educational provision and restructuring’. ⁸⁶ Wenger comments that

if we proceed without reflecting on our fundamental assumptions about the nature of learning, we run an increasing risk that our conceptions will have misleading ramifications . . . it is our conception of learning that needs urgent attention when we choose to meddle with it on the scale that we do today. ⁸⁷

Beekeeping in the United Kingdom today is the site of significant restructuring in how training is provided. Government in the United Kingdom has been involved in beekeeping since the 1940s, ⁸⁸ but since around 2007 when pollinator declines became a concern, ⁸⁹ the NBU has increasingly sought to engage with beekeepers due to their role in supporting colonies during food shortages or disease/pest outbreaks, a role increasingly emphasised by the NBU in policy documentation. ⁹⁰ In parallel with this increased political engagement, there has been a strong upsurge in interest in beekeeping, with some clubs in the case study area experiencing rises in demand for training from around 5 to around 60 people per year, placing huge stress on trainers and in some cases leading to the creation of club training apiaries. ⁹¹ This surge raised concerns about standards of training at a time when honeybees face continued health issues, ⁹² and so government–beekeeper interactions have centred around training and education: supporting beekeeping trainers, ⁹³ developing beekeeping standards (e.g. ‘best practice’ guidelines) and promoting beekeeping qualifications. ⁹⁴

These changes have, perhaps inevitably, created tensions at both the small and large scale, reflecting Crang’s recommendation to reflect across scales. ⁹⁵ Probably the biggest tension has been the focus on formal examinations. There is a history of beekeeping examinations offered by the BBKA ⁹⁶ and supported by the NBU. However, until recently, exams were undertaken only by serious enthusiasts. The government has sought to make exams such as the BBKA Basic exam, described by one beekeeper as a ‘driving license’ for novices, the new normal route through the ‘step to independence’. The logic is clear: qualifications and exams are commonly used to define competence in and membership of a profession, ⁹⁷ offering a clear picture of what the learning process is meant to achieve with an objective evaluation of learning, ⁹⁸ and in the context of beekeeping should also serve to reduce pressure on trainers and mentors. Yet, exams are a new phenomenon for the majority of beekeepers, as one beekeeping trainer told me:

We didn’t take exams until 5 years ago, before then no one would have bothered, then we decided it would be a good thing to do . . . A lot of beekeepers don’t take them. If you have your Basic that is good. Everyone should get that, it is a degree of competency and it helps if you have problems. (Beekeeper interview, 2011)

The ‘small’ issue here is that examinations sit at odds with the motivation of many novice beekeepers who practise beekeeping as a hobby and leisure activity.

The participants in this research were predominantly older and aged between 50 and 70 years old, and many of the novices I encountered had taken up beekeeping on retirement, a life event often associated with adopting new activities. ⁹⁹ Adult learners like beekeepers have a range of motivations behind taking up the activity ¹⁰⁰ and people can be resistant to learning difficult things, especially if they cause anxiety, which can make exams unattractive. ¹⁰¹ Roulston ¹⁰² suggests that a key element of adult education is capturing the ‘essence of the experience’, something which exams can detract from. Mills and Kraftl question whether it is important to know whether learners are older or younger. ¹⁰³ I would argue that age and life-stage are important, because the common perception that education and learning are strictly rational ¹⁰⁴ hides the importance of emotion as a motivator. It is clear from this study that emotions such as anxiety play a powerful role in learning, and if training as part of a leisure activity is altered to include more of this sort of activity, then there is likely to be a reduction in engagement, which in the case of beekeeping may lead to fewer beekeepers or less-skilled beekeepers – an unexpected result of changes intended to improve standards of practice.

This raises a second area of tension, around the role of volunteers in delivering training. Mills notes the need for geography to ‘interrogate the connections between education, volunteering and civil society’. ¹⁰⁵ As noted earlier, the majority of beekeeping training is delivered by volunteers. People often need help to pass exams, leading to some clubs providing additional exam training, requiring further time and effort from volunteer trainers who may already be very busy:

The people who signed up to help with our course just ended up with so much to do, it was really bad. The same few people are always overloaded, as always you never get enough volunteers for these things, so that was very difficult. (Beekeeper interview, 2011)

The NBU-driven changes in expectations of what beekeeping training is have challenged the capacity of volunteers to deliver, and during my research, at least four trainers, who had provided free training to their clubs for years, decided that they needed to reduce or stop their training activities as the demand on their time was too much - an unexpected consequence of changes designed to support and improve beekeeping. This observation, which draws together both large- and small-scale elements of beekeeper learning, makes it clear that while understanding the learning process is important, so too is the social context in which it occurs, a finding that has relevance for those researchers engaged in studies of hobbies and clubs, ¹⁰⁶ where the focus of geographical research is often on the activities of individuals and not necessarily on the wider political/social context in which those activities are undertaken.

Having said that, it is worth noting that this study took place after these changes had been initiated. By the time my fieldwork started, most clubs in the area had some sort of club apiary, ran training classes and offered mentoring, often building on older training programmes but with a renewed focus on bee health management stimulated by the NBU. ¹⁰⁷ The result of NBU engagement has been to improve many aspects of training provision. However, it has raised another area of tension around balancing the formal and informal elements of learning outlined above. The authority ¹⁰⁸ of the NBU is considerable and creates tension when recommendations made by the NBU conflict with the experiences of beekeepers. As Krzywoszynska comments in a study on vine cultivation, ‘care is not possible when the practitioner cares more about adhering to the rules and procedures than they do about doing the right thing, as doing the right thing is always contextual, local, and temporary’. ¹⁰⁹ The move towards increasingly formal learning, especially the use of exams and qualifications which bring with them an implication of an end-point to learning, contrasts strongly with the earlier sections presented here and the statement made at the start of this article about beekeeping requiring ‘a lifetime of learning’, which supports Ingold’s understanding of skills ‘growing’ through an active engagement with the practices and surroundings of the activity. ¹¹⁰ By recommending standards and exams, the NBU and the BBKA have created a presumption that beekeeping knowledge can be generalised for efficient sharing and reinforce the cultural division between mind, body and environment that recent work ¹¹¹ on skill has sought to reimagine.

By identifying these tensions, this study seeks to contribute to Mills’ conception of training as a complex mix of formal and informal learning processes ¹¹² and seeks to balance perceptions of skills as ‘natural and intuitive’, ¹¹³ enskilment as a ‘never-ending experimental engagement’ ¹¹⁴ while engaging with ongoing efforts to broaden the perception of ‘knowledge’ to be more inclusive of ‘body work’ and skills that are currently often not valued in the same way as other knowledge-types. ¹¹⁵ Ultimately, learning to beekeep is no different to learning other new skills: it requires effort, time, commitment and the support of others who are better than you. Returning to Wadey’s quote at the start of this article, beekeeping might be a ‘difficult art’, but it also has a lot to offer by way of interest, challenge and ‘joys’, not least the opportunity for ‘attunement’ with a very interesting insect.