The more-than-human mobilities of nomadic beekeeping in China

Mobilities are more than simply human practices. Professional beekeepers in China adopt nomadic migration to chase flowers around the country for honey production. Such a more-than-human constellation of mobilities, in which humans move with animals under the influences of multiple more-than-human actants, provides a vivid example to advance the theoretical framework of ‘more-than-human mobilities’. By unravelling the routine and improvisational decision-making of beekeeping routes, this article identifies five vital actants – seasonal climate, volatile weather, vegetal resources, honeybee labourers, and human beekeepers – that shape and performe such more-than-human mobilities. This article advances an understanding of more-than-human mobilities as multiplicities, which are assembled from multiple heterogeneous, uneven, and partially aligned mobilities unfolding across different temporalities, materialities, and agencies.