Voluminous Socialities: Honeybee Conservation, Commerce, and Commons in Transcarpathia, Ukraine

The loss of intra-species diversity in Western honeybees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus) in places where they evolved is considered a key factor in honeybee declines. Conserving local honeybee populations via a “conservation by utilization” approach is thought to be the most effective response because it fuses breeding for conservation and for commercially-useful traits. Tensions arise, however, from this approach’s dependence on queens’ marketability and its distinctive three-dimensional spatiality. Because queens mate with many drones several kilometers from their nests, conservation- and commercially-oriented breeders rely on isolated mating stations to ensure specific queens and drones mate. This article draws on ethnographic research and oral history interviews conducted between 2018 and 2025 to analyze conflicts over the use of isolated mating areas in western Ukraine’s Transcarpathia Oblast to breed Carpathian honeybees before and after Russia’s full-scale invasion. Suspicion that non-Carpathian drones were placed at a commercial mating station led to the creation of new stations, including a collaborative community-based one which sought to “common” the “drone atmosphere.” I argue that these conflicts can best be understood by a) framing the history of Carpathian honeybees in terms of resource-making on imperial peripheries and b) using a concept of “voluminous socialities” which builds on and extends geographical and anthropological conceptualizations of non-military-, non-state-focused volumes, sociality, and interspecies relations. My analysis enriches geographical debates about three-dimensional spatiality and deepens our understanding of what it means to do honeybee conservation in a non-EU European periphery amidst changing political economies of beekeeping and an imperial war.