Every hundred years, as the story goes, two angels turn their attention to the world to investigate whether the bees are still swarming. If they are reassured that the bees are flourishing, they conclude that the end of the world is not near.
Beekeeping in the End Times narrates ecological disasters that have shaken Bosnia and Herzegovina since 2014, fueled by increasingly extreme weather and provoked by the global decline and disappearance of honeybees and wild pollinators. Jašarević tells this tale through the lens of Islam's Quran and Hadith, which foretell that the endangerment of nonhuman animals, bees especially, is a warning of the world's end.
In the "not yet kijamet" (end of the world), Bosnian Muslim beekeepers and bee lovers like Jašarević and her sister study the remedial qualities of nature and work out strategies for multispecies salvation by planting, foraging, and caring for bodily health—human, animal, and vegetal. For Jašarević and the beekeepers, the meantime of "not yet kijamet," is the high time to work against the apocalypse.
