A defining scientific challenge of our time resides in capturing the complexities of the processes of livelihood adaptation in contexts of accelerating environmental and social change. In this study, we adopted a relational and multi-species approach to investigate the ways in which beekeeping practices among Maa-speaking pastoralists in Laikipia, Kenya, have been affected by manifold interacting drivers such as expansion of economic frontiers, livelihood commodification, declining social cohesion, and widespread environmental change. Our study revealed that beekeeping is a main livelihood practice responding to material and cultural needs, embedded in a changing web of social and ecological variables where adaptation is a continuous process involving social-ecological feedbacks and multi-species agencies. New livelihood trajectories-namely from extensive, subsistence-aimed, log hive-based beekeeping toward a homestead-based, market-engaged form with modern hives- emerge from the heterogeneous responses of households and communities to these dynamic interactions. Tracking changes in social-ecological entanglements around beekeeping enabled us to capture adaptation as a relational and multi-species process, an approach particularly useful among communities whose livelihoods depend directly on the local environment.