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Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Bees & Environmental Change in West MI
March 20 @ 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Public talk on the history of honeybees and beekeeping in the Great Lakes region & how honeybee-driven agriculture changed our landscape.
This is part of the 15th Annual Local History Roundtable conference. This year’s keynote presenter is Dr. Jennifer Bonnell, Associate Professor of History at York University. She will speak about her forthcoming book, Foragers of a Modern Countryside: Honeybees, Agricultural Modernization, and Environmental Change in the Great Lakes Region.
Roughly one-third of the food crops we currently consume in North America require honeybees to produce food. These tiny-but-mighty pollinators are not native to the Americas, and were not raised at scale until the late 1800s and early 1900s. As Europeans forced westward, Michigan’s native crops that Indigenous people grew for centuries were replaced by new, non-native crops that required these new, non-native honeybees to grow. Fast forward to the early 2000s, and enormous numbers of honeybees have vanished or died in what has been dubbed Colony Collapse Disorder.
Bonnell’s work breaks down the history of honeybees in the Great Lakes region, how beekeepers and honeybee-driven agriculture have changed the Midwestern landscape, and how the threat of Colony Collapse Disorder changes everything.