Eleanor Andrews

PhD Candidate & Honey Bee Extension Assistant, Dyce Lab of Honey Bee Studies, Cornell University

Ellie received a master’s degree in Geography (Penn State University, 2012) and a bachelor’s degree is in Political Science and French (Amherst College, 2006). In 2017-18, she taught in the Environmental Studies department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.

She is interested in the human relationship to the environment: dueling visions of sustainability, the social causes and consequences of climate change, the implications of the Anthropocene for conservation, and more. Political economy and political ecology underpin her research, with forays into environmental history, science and technology studies, and nature-society geography.

Her current research examines how beekeeping is changing in response to ongoing honey bee health challenges, as it becomes ever more difficult to keep bees healthy and productive. Through participatory observation and interviews, her work shows how competing visions of “sustainable beekeeping” are being re-shaped by novel ecologies, challenges to conventional authority and expertise, and the hybridity of honey bees as part-wild, part-domesticated creatures.