Urban Honey : Apiculture in the Heart of an American City (2013)

Undergraduate: Kate Grady

Faculty Advisor: Noreen McDonald
Department: Geography

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The local food movement has gained growing attention in the last decade, both popularly and academically. Apiculture, otherwise known as beekeeping, has become a part of that movement, surprisingly in urban areas along with rural. New York City legalized apiculture in 2010, and it is now practiced both recreationally and commercially in all five boroughs. My work focused on beekeeping in Brooklyn, examining the new practice through the lens of political ecology to describe the cultural, ecological and economic conditions and changes surrounding it. Urban beekeeping not only provides certain residents of New York City with sustenance, but also serves as a vehicle through which they assert their right to the ecological and political space of the city. Support for urban beekeeping comes from many scalar levels, most notably the Bloomberg administration through programs that seek to increase access to locally-grown food options in order to combat obesity (though this is contentious). I kept a summer-long blog devoted to my findings on the culture of beekeeping as well as the process of performing political ecological research. Ideas and blurbs from this blog were used at meetings and in online venues by New York City beekeepers. Furthermore, this work has provided the basis for two semesters of further research in Geography and Food Studies so far, and will continue to be the main focus of my undergraduate career here at UNC.