Digital Hives, Nonhuman Work and the Real Subsumption of Nature: Fixing Pollination in Capitalist Agriculture

This article examines the emerging technology of ‘smart hives’ which use sensors fitted to beehives to monitor and record multiple aspects of honey bees’ activity along with various measures of the health and productivity of the colony. The data feeds analytic algorithms which can guide hive and pollination management, purportedly enabling improvements in pollination efficacy alongside reduced environmental impacts. In this way ‘precision pollination’ is hailed as an answer to the challenges of pollinator decline whilst ensuring food security in the context of climate change. Drawing from scholarship on capitalist orientations to nature, socio-ecological crises and fixes, and the ‘real subsumption of nature under capital’, this article outlines a political ecology of digital pollination, situating ‘smart hives’ in the context of the industrialisation of pollination. It argues not just that ‘smart hives’ mark a shift from the formal to the real subsumption of pollination under capital as a ‘fix’ for the socio-ecological crisis of commercial pollination services, but that this is underpinned by an intensification of the pollination work of bees in conjunction with the real subsumption of the labour of beekeepers. In this way it contributes to a multispecies framing of real subsumption which reckons with the role of shifting modalities of capitalist appropriation of human and nonhuman work.