Numerical translations and labor conditions in China’s honey supply chain

Building on Tsing’s concept of salvage accumulation, which theorized capitalism as profiting without controlling commodity production, this paper takes Chinese apiculture – characterized by vertical integration – as a case study to examine how translation processes are performed and what labor conditions are (re)shaped within honey supply chains. In this system of merchant capitalism, smallholder beekeepers remain outside direct capitalist control during production; instead, they depend on middlemen to purchase their harvested honey for subsequent market exchange. These transactions are more than simple commercial exchanges. They operate as acts of translation that convert a non-capitalist, multispecies product into an abstract commodity value, measured through the Baumé scale. Yet, due to honey’s lively materialities, such numerical indicators are inherently unstable, both ecologically contingent and technically modifiable. The interplay between translation mechanisms, material indeterminacy, and market pressure contributes to precarious livelihoods for beekeepers, who respond through forms of self-exploitation: intensifying labor, accelerating extraction cycles, and exerting metabolic pressure on honeybees to increase output. By unpacking these translation practices and labor dynamics in Chinese apiculture, this paper offers ethnographic and theoretical contributions on geographies of marketization and diverse economies, foregrounding the roles of friction politics, lively materialities, and localized capitalism.