Posts tagged ‘beehive’
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“Yes Bee Can!”
Everyone is jumping on the beekeeping bandwagon, even the White House!
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Hugh Raffles on Urban Beekeeping
Hugh Raffles (author of the excellent Insectopedia) writes an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times praising urban beekeeping.
Please stop whatever you’re doing and buy his great book Insectopedia now!
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The Art of Bees
A special guest post from Pestival team member abroad Ariane Koek:
What can bees tell us about modernist aesthetics? That’s one of the key questions posed this month at Dallas Contemporary’s latest exhibition Seedlings. Nine contemporary artists investigate the ways in which natural systems have informed human industry and art making, and investigate new possibilities of collaborations with nature. Amongst them is Pennsylvanian artist Hilary Berseth, who like Rodin and Warhol, has outsourced the making of his art. Unlike them, he has outsourced it to possibly the most industrious workers of them all – bees.
He makes frames out of wire and wax, then lets the bees loose into a closed box in the spring to do the rest of the work, creating great spiral honeycombs and all the other shapes he imagines, all with the help of a maths graduate turned beekeeper friend, Jim Bobb.
(image: Hilary Berseth’s ‘Programmed Hive’ sculpture. Photos © Hannah Whitaker / New York Magazine)But is this art? And isn’t he just enslaving insects to make his work for him, whilst destroying a natural aesthetic? Make up your own mind, but Hilary Berseth says not. He says he was amazed how you can manipulate the bees’ instincts about proportion and form.
“You can plan out a certain amount of what’s going to happen, and then that design will sort of ripple through, and then they’ll begin to draw out combs and riff off that design.”
Berseth works with the bees, manipulating their movements, leading them into the shapes that he wants to create. But he is not the first person to work with bees in this way. Take the work of the sculptor Garnett Puett. He too engages with thousands of honeybees, tireless builders in wax, who are the incredible movers and shapers of a delicate architecture they have known how to construct for millions of years. He calls them ‘apisculptures` but unlike Beseth, makes safety-glass boxes containing sculptures of wood, metal and beeswax which actually are abandoned apiaries, where bees have deposited lacy networks of honeycomb on the armatures Puett offered them, making sculptures like Basal Wax Mirror and Apis Loom which were sold in contemporary arts sales in New York.
(image: Garnett Puett’s ‘Apis Loom’)
(image: Garnett Puett’s ‘Basal Wax Mirror’)So what can bees tell us about modernist aesthetics? Certainly what both these artists are showing is a fascination with bees and a wish to control their creativity and making. What do you think?
Seedlings curated by Regine Basha is at Dallas Contemporary until August 8th 2010.
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Solitary Bee Builds Nest from Flower Petals
Most people think of the hive mentality when they think of bees. BUT… the rare and fragrant Osmia avoseta bee shuns communal living, fends for itself and creates single nests for each of its offspring, built entirely out of petals. How romantic, candle lit meal for one anyone?
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3D Images Show Inside View of Beehive
Check out entomologist Mark Greco and his team at the Swiss Bee Research Centre in Bern. They’ve devised a new 3D imaging technique called Diagnostic Radioentomology (DR) to scan a live beehive. That means we can see what’s going on “in da hive” in real time without disturbing the bees. Very useful in these terrible times of colony collapse, as it might give us some clues to help the bees survive….
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