A Social Ecology of Stingless Bees Natasha Fijn 1 & Marcus Baynes-Rock 2 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2018 Abstract Here we highlight two ontologically different modes of care and management of endemic stingless bees in Australia. While Indigenous Yolngu and backyard beekeepers both engage in caring for stingless bees, neither way of living with bees would classically be defined as ‘domestication’, yet bees are encompassed within the ‘home’, or domus. This requires a different perspective in relation to the kinds of multispecies connections between humans and other beings. We propose that the key difference between Aboriginal Australians hunting for sugarbag on country and beekeeping in the backyard is in the way bee populations are maintained and in the degree of ecological separation from the surrounding environment. For Yolngu the domus is the bush. Backyard beekeeping involves modes of care that separate bees from outside predators, pests and other detrimental elements, while the Yolngu relationship with bees is primarily concerned with maintaining the integrity of the surrounding ecology, or the homeland. Keywords Aboriginal Australia . beekeeping . domestication . stingless bees . Yolngu Introduction It is commonly thought that humans have successfully ‘do- mesticated’ bees for the production, extraction and consump- tion of honey (Kritsky 2010). Endemic stingless bees found in Australia, however, have not previously been domesticated. 1 Yet stingless bees have been co-habiting with humans as part of the home for thousands of years (Crane 1999). Here two quite different concepts tend to become conflated in relation to theories of domestication: the evolutionary scale of the pro- cess of domestication; and the spatio-temporal scale of living within a domestic sphere, or domus. Instead of the usual con- sideration of domestication in relation to the adaptive process, as anthropologists we are primarily interested in the notion of the domus, or the home, as a universal concept. This concept of the home is also evident beyond the hu- man, across the more-than-human world. Zoologists use slightly different terminology: in relation to bees, a nest or hive, or existing more broadly within a home range. 2 Animal species, therefore, are generally recognised as being located within a home. 3 To extend this concept of the domus in both Aboriginal Australian ontological and scientific terms, the word ‘ecology’ works across both knowledge systems, as ecology stems from the Greek word oikos, meaning ‘home’, or a ‘place to live’. We refer to Yolngu connections with other beings and the land, as a ‘social ecology’, to include socio-cultural and environmental aspects. In alignment with the concept of the western world’ s hyper- separation from nature, part of the aim within this paper is to break down the dominating binaries of nature from culture, domestic from wild and human from other animal (Descola 2013; Strathern 1980). ‘One key aspect of the Western capi- talist framework ‘is the view of nature as sharply discontinu- ous or ontologically divided from the human sphere of reason’ (Plumwood 1993, p. 155). Plumwood called for re-situating 2 According to Encyclopaedia Britannica’ s ecological definition, the ‘home range’ of an animal is the spatial area where it spends its time; it is the region that encompasses all the resources the animal requires to survive and repro- duce ( http://www.britannica.com/science/home-range , accessed 27 June 2017). 3 Tim Ingold makes a distinction between a house and a home, whereby the physical structure itself is the house (or nest), while the setting it is within, where individuals dwell is the home (Ingold 2000, p. 185). 1 There is literature positing that the Mayans ‘semi-domesticated’ stingless bees prior to the arrival of the Spanish (Crane 1999). * Natasha Fijn Natasha.Fijn@anu.edu.au * Marcus Baynes-Rock Marcus.R.Baynes–Rock.1@nd.edu 1 College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University, Canberra 0206, Australia 2 Department of Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Human Ecology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-018-9983-0