Sainath Suryanarayanan

Dying Bees and the Social Production of Ignorance

This article utilizes the ongoing debates over the role of certain agricultural insecticides in causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—the phenomenon of accelerated bee die-offs in the United States and elsewhere—as an opportunity to contribute to the emerging literature on the social production of ignorance. In our effort to understand the social contexts that shape knowledge/nonknowledge production in this case, we develop the concept of epistemic form. Epistemic form is the suite of concepts, methods, measures, and interpretations that shapes the ways in which actors produce knowledge and ignorance in their professional/intellectual fields of practice. In the CCD controversy, we examine how the (historically influenced) privileging of certain epistemic forms intersects with the social dynamics of academic, regulatory, and corporate organizations to lead to the institutionalization of three interrelated and overlapping types of ignorance. We consider the effects of these types of ignorance on US regulatory policy and on the lives of different stakeholders.

A Mechanical Signal Biases Caste Development in a Social Wasp

Understanding the proximate mechanisms of caste development in eusocial taxa can reveal how social species evolved from solitary ancestors. In Polistes wasps, the current paradigm holds that differential amounts of nutrition during the larval stage cause the divergence of worker and gyne (potential queen) castes. But nutrition level alone cannot explain how the first few females to be produced in a colony develop rapidly yet have small body sizes and worker phenotypes. Here, we provide evidence that a mechanical signal biases caste toward a worker phenotype. In Polistes fuscatus, the signal takes the form of antennal drumming (AD), wherein a female trills her antennae synchronously on the rims of nest cells while feeding prey-liquid to larvae. The frequency of AD occurrence is high early in the colony cycle, when larvae destined to become workers are being reared, and low late in the cycle, when gynes are being reared. Subjecting gyne-destined brood to simulated AD-frequency vibrations caused them to emerge as adults with reduced fat stores, a worker trait. This suggests that AD influences the larval developmental trajectory by inhibiting a physiological element that is necessary to trigger diapause, a gyne trait.

Be(e)coming experts: The controversy over insecticides in the honey bee colony collapse disorder

In this article, we explore the politics of expertise in an ongoing controversy in the United States over the role of certain insecticides in colony collapse disorder – a phenomenon involving mass die-offs of honey bees. Numerous long-time commercial beekeepers contend that newer systemic agricultural insecticides are a crucial part of the cocktail of factors responsible for colony collapse disorder. Many scientists actively researching colony collapse disorder reject the beekeepers’ claims, citing the lack of conclusive evidence from field experiments by academic and industry toxicologists. US Environmental Protection Agency regulators, in turn, privilege the latters’ approach to the issue, and use the lack of conclusive evidence of systemic insecticides’ role in colony collapse disorder to justify permitting these chemicals to remain on the market. Drawing on semistructured interviews with key players in the controversy, as well as published documents and ethnographic data, we show how a set of research norms and practices from agricultural entomology came to dominate the investigation of the links between pesticides and honey bee health, and how the epistemological dominance of these norms and practices served to marginalize the knowledge claims and policy positions of commercial beekeepers in the colony collapse disorder controversy. We conclude with a discussion of how the colony collapse disorder case can help us think about the nature and politics of expertise.

A new model for caste development in social wasps.

Specialization into reproductive and non-reproductive castes is one of the defining traits of eusocial insects. Knowledge of the proximal causes of caste differentiation is therefore central to achieving an understanding of the evolution of eusociality. Castes are an example of a polyphenism, multiple, discrete phenotypes arising from a single genotype in response to differing environmental conditions. Here we focus on recent work in the social wasps to provide insight into how environmental conditions may trigger the development of caste across a range from independent- to swarm-founding social species. The amount of food larvae receive has long been recognized as a key input factor in the determination of caste, but that alone is insufficient to account for the range of combinations of size, development time, and caste among the female offspring of Polistes, an independent-founding wasp. Recent experimental work on P. fuscatus has shown that vibrations that are associated with the feeding of larvae are another essential environmental input in the determination of caste. We present a model of how vibrational signaling in the context of feeding larvae could interact with nutritional input to account for the developmental patterns seen in these wasps. Mapping the distribution of vibrational signaling onto a phylogeny of the social wasps suggests that this trait characterized the common ancestor of the subfamilies Vespinae + Polistinae, diversified in the independent-founding species, then was superseded by caste-determining mechanisms in the swarm-founding and vespine species that function more effectively in larger colonies.

Pesticides and pollinators: a context-sensitive policy approach

I examine recent policymaking efforts in the United States (US) that seek to improve how risks posed by pesticides to insect pollinators are assessed and managed. Utilizing the case of ongoing honey bee die-offs, I argue for a context-sensitive policy framework. From a scientific perspective, this entails not ignoring the uncertain knowledge emerging from laboratory and field studies regarding the indirect effects of low levels of certain insecticides in combination with other factors. From a social scientific perspective, policy initiatives to build partnerships between growers and beekeepers toward mitigating exposure to pesticides are crucial, and need to acknowledge barriers to the adoption of best management practices as well as a historically-established asymmetry between growers and beekeepers in the pollination industry.

Balancing Control and Complexity in Field Studies of Neonicotinoids and Honey Bee Health

Amidst ongoing declines in honey bee health, the contributory role of the newer systemic insecticides continues to be intensely debated. Scores of toxicological field experiments, which bee scientists and regulators in the United States have looked to for definitive causal evidence, indicate a lack of support. This paper analyzes the methodological norms that shape the design and interpretation of field toxicological studies. I argue that contemporary field studies of honey bees and pesticides are underpinned by a “control-oriented” approach, which precludes a serious investigation of the indirect and multifactorial ways in which pesticides could drive declines in honey bee health. I trace the historical rise to prominence of this approach in honey bee toxicology to the development of entomology as a science of insecticide development in the United States. Drawing on “complexity-oriented” knowledge practices in ecology, epidemiology, beekeeping and sociology, I suggest an alternative socio-ecological systems approach, which would entail in situ studies that are less concerned with isolating individual factors and more attentive to the interactive and place-based mix of factors affecting honey bee health.

Maternal and nourishment factors interact to influence offspring developmental trajectories in social wasps

The social and nutritional environments during early development have the potential to affect offspring traits, but the mechanisms and molecular underpinnings of these effects remain elusive. We used Polistes fuscatus paper wasps to dissect how maternally controlled factors (vibrational signals and nourishment) interact to induce different caste developmental trajectories in female offspring, leading to worker or reproductive (gyne) traits. We established a set of caste phenotype biomarkers in P. fuscatus females, finding that gyne-destined individuals had high expression of three caste-related genes hypothesized to have roles in diapause and mitochondrial metabolism. We then experimentally manipulated maternal vibrational signals (via artificial ‘antennal drumming’) and nourishment levels (via restricted foraging). We found that these caste-related biomarker genes were responsive to drumming, nourishment level or their interaction. Our results provide a striking example of the potent influence of maternal and nutritional effects in influencing transcriptional activity and developmental outcomes in offspring.

Beekeepers’ Collective Resistance and the Politics of Pesticide Regulation in France and the United States

Abstract This paper utilizes controversies over the role of a set of insecticides in mass honey bee die-offs in two different national contexts – France and the United States – in order to understand the science-state nexus in a comparative manner. On the one hand, the French government in 1999 and 2004 suspended the commercial use of the insecticidal products that beekeepers suspected of causing the honey bee declines. On the other hand, the US government has to date refused to heed beekeepers’ calls to limit the usage of the very same set of insecticides. We examine why the governments of France and the United States came to contrasting conclusions regarding broadly similar technoscientific issues. The divergent outcomes, we argue, are not simply the result of predetermined differences in the two states’ regulatory paradigms (with France being “precautionary,” and the United States adhering to a “sound science” approach), but are underpinned by divergent forms of beekeepers’ resistance. The paper further sheds light on non-state actors’ use of science and state to contest state (in)action by analyzing how historically influenced differences in state structures, the relational dynamics of beekeepers’ and farmers’ organizations, and the epistemic cultures of honey bee knowledge production, shaped different forms of resistance and influence in France and the United States.

Undone Science: Social Movements, Mobilized Publics, and Industrial Transitions:

from the micro setting, mapping and exploring the broader web of relations influencing these behaviors. He championed a comparative approach, encouraging researchers to gather data from multiple settings to refine, further develop, and extend the scope of sociological concepts. All of this required, for Hughes, a distinct ‘‘sociological eye,’’ nurtured through emancipation—the freeing of researchers from the limitations of their own positions and meaning frames. According to Helmes-Hayes, Hughes favored a detached, value-free research role for this, while managing to sustain a passionate commitment to equality and social justice. Other chapters give us a more intimate portrait of Hughes as a teacher. In Chapter Three, Philippe Vienne provides a ‘‘natural history’’ of Hughes’s role as a teacher of field methods. Hughes viewed his job as mentor as a hard, serious job, ‘‘grilling’’ and disciplining apprentices to do work that does not come naturally and that cannot be routinized. The passion Hughes devoted to this role comes out well in Howard S. Becker’s Forward, in Vienne’s Chapter Three, and in Chapter Five, where Douglas Harper recalls the role Hughes played as an advisor for his dissertation research on working hobos. In Chapter Nine, Neil McLaughlin and Stephen Steinberg produce an unusually critical chapter. They view with irony the fact that Hughes presented his ASA presidential address, ‘‘Race Relations and the Sociological Imagination,’’ on the same day as the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech. Hughes begins his address by noting sociology’s inability to anticipate and explain the civil rights movement. Noting this, McLaughlin and Steinberg hold Hughes up as the symbol of white establishment sociology and critique him for ignoring and repressing scholarship employing the perspective of ‘‘Black Marxism,’’ the framework developed by African American scholars active in Hughes’s day linking black insurgency to capitalist oppression and colonialism. Just what, then, was Hughes’s legacy? Some define Hughes’s contributions as underestimated and forgotten. Helmes-Hayes and Santoro present citation count data in the Introduction. Hughes’s work, compared to other American theorists, doesn’t generate a high volume of references. And Hughes’s name is not associated with a prominent school or methodology, largely because Hughes did not favor this. However, Vienne challenges the view that Hughes’s influence has been marginalized, pointing out that Hughes’s work has undergone a recent revival, led by his former students, especially Becker. This revival is strong in France and is spreading throughout Europe. Jacqueline Low and Gary Bowden discuss Hughes’s influence on Canadian sociology’s development in Chapter Four. Hughes had a formative influence on both English and French sociology in Canada and is regarded to this day as a ‘‘patron saint’’ there. Hughes also had a strong influence on the very best American and Canadian sociologists and the classic works they produced over a span of several decades. Work inspired by Hughes continues to inspire new generations of sociologists. The best place to get an appreciation of Hughes’s sociology, in my opinion, is to read and reread seriously the essays in The Sociological Eye (1971). This is where Hughes’s sociology comes to life for me. The Anthem Companion is useful in conjunction with the primary sources in that it specifies Hughes’s theoretical and methodological orientation more explicitly and rigorously. It also gives readers a flavor for the history of Hughes’s times and the character and passion of a great teacher and scholar.