Posts tagged ‘bees’
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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 Honeybee Magnified
Following from our recent post on insect photomicrography, if you like those then you’ll love photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher.
Her beautiful new book BEE, recently published by Princeton Architectural Press, presents 60 incredible magnified images of the honeybee. These remarkable photographs were shot through a scanning electron microscope at magnifications ranging from 10x to 5000x.
From the publisher:
Rendered in stunning detail, Fisher’s photographs uncover the strange beauty of the honeybee’s pattern, form, and structure. Comprising 6,900 hexagonal lenses, their eyes resemble the structure of a honeycomb. The honeybee’s proboscis—a strawlike appendage used to suck nectar out of flowers, folds resembles a long, slender hairy tongue. Its six-legged exoskeleton is fuzzy with hairs that build up a static charge as the bee flies in order to electrically attract pollen. Wings clasp together with tiny hooks and a double-edged stinger resembles a serrated hypodermic needle. The honeybee’s three pairs of segmented legs are a revelation, with their antennae cleaners, sharp-pointed claws, and baskets to carry pollen to the hive. These visual discoveries, made otherworldly through Fisher’s lens, expand the boundaries of our thinking about the natural world and stimulate our imaginations.
For our readers in New York, you can check out her exhibition BEE – A magnified exploration of the honeybee and its anatomy as art at the Farmani Gallery in Brooklyn, which runs until July 3rd.
(Via Book By Its Cover, photos © Julia Rothman)
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German Airports Use Bees to Monitor Air Quality
Bees have been helping airports in Germany monitor their air quality. The honey is tested regularly for toxins, and after turning up clean, it’s bottled and given away as gifts.
From The New York Times:
Volker Liebig, a chemist for Orga Lab, who analyzes honey samples twice a year for the Düsseldorf and six other German airports, said results showed the absence of substances that the lab tested for, like certain hydrocarbons and heavy metals, and the honey “was comparable to honey produced in areas without any industrial activity.” A much larger data sampling over more time is needed for a definitive conclusion, he said, but preliminary results are promising.
(Image: Walter Klumpp, beekeeper in charge of Düsseldorf airport bees.
© Andreas Wiese/Düsseldorf International Airport) -
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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The bee and the dandelion – evolution and art
I’m Matthew Cobb, a scientist working at the University of Manchester, who was involved in the second Pestival, in 2009. I study insect behaviour, in particular how the sense of smell functions in insects.
I focus my work on maggots because they are extremely simple (they have 21 smell cells; you and I have about 4 million), yet the “wiring diagram” of how the nose and the brain are wired together is basically the same in all animals. At Pestival I ran the maggot painting workshop, where we got maggots to paint pictures by plonking them in paint and watching them wriggle, leaving a trail behind them.
I’ll be blogging occasionally on the Pestival website. I also have a weekly (ish) electronic newsletter about all things zoological (anyone can sign up!), which also has a website, z-letter.com. And I sometimes act as guest blogger at Jerry Coyne’s WhyEvolutionIsTrue.com. When I write here, I’ll try and keep it simple and amusing, and link it to aspects of insects and art – the whole point of Pestival, after all.
Today, a word or two about how flowers have evolved, and what role insects have played. Flowering plants, or angiosperms, appeared around 140 million years ago. Prior to the evolution of flowers, the dominant plants were gymnosperms (plants like conifers and ginkos). The insects appeared around 400 million years ago, and really took off at around the same time as the gymnosperms – munching their way through the seeds of these new plants. Last year, an amazing 170 million year-old fossil was described in Science. The scientists suggested that the ancestors of today’s scorpion flies may have sucked nectar seeping out from gymnosperms, and were probably involved in pollination, as shown in this drawing:
But the development of flowers allowed for the rapid evolution of both plants and insects. As the flowering plants became increasingly varied, so too did the insects that were both feeding from them and pollinating them. In particular, the period when the flowers appeared coincided with the evolution of the butterflies, which remain a key pollinator for many flowering plants today.
One of the fascinating things about how flowers and insects have co-evolved is that the senses of insects – their perception and their choices – have literally shaped flowers. Insect colour perception is not like ours – they can see colours into the ultra-violet part of the spectrum, which are invisible to us. UV-patterns on flowers can provide insects with extra visible guides to where the nectar – and the pollen – can be found. Even the common dandelion conceals a hidden message, as shown in this photo from Bjorn Rosslett’s site:
Darwin was fascinated by the links between animal and human behaviour. He recognised that, because humans are animals, we should be able to see precursors of our behaviours in animals. He suggested that our aesthetic and artistic senses have their origin in animal perception of “good” characters in food and mates. In other words, our appreciation of art has its roots in the way that animals are attracted to their prey, or a potential partner. Our appreciation of the beauty of a flower may not be so far away from the responses of a bee faced with a dandelion.
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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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Beecab takes flight!
Our Beecab has emerged and is now buzzing around the streets of London!
Beecab is a London taxi which has been specially customized by artists and scientists for Pestival. It recently featured on London Tonight, and was launched from the Wellcome Trust on Thursday 18th June.
The theme of this year’s Pestival is the collapse of bee colonies around the world. To raise awareness of the plight of bees, one of London’s iconic black cabs has been transformed into a bumblebee in full flight, complete with a working beehive in the front seat. Keep a look out for this spectacular sight, which will be traveling around London and visiting schools from now until the festival opens in September.
The Beecab’s driver is Steve Benbow, a British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) beekeeper himself. Steve notes the aptness of the Beecab: “Bees and cabbies have more in common than you might think – the way bees navigate is very similar to the way cab drivers use the Knowledge to get round London. They both service the city, and with the Varroa mite wiping out wild colonies of bees, urban beekeeping is more important than ever. Bees are vital for the pollination of flowers and fruit in the capital, and beekeepers are the only way the population of honey bees can be maintained in London.”
Dr Pat Goodwin, Head of Pathogens, Immunology and Population Health at the Wellcome Trust, said: “The decline in bees and other pollinators may devastate our environment and would almost certainly have a serious impact on our health and wellbeing. As well as funding research into the reasons behind the decline in pollinators, the Wellcome Trust is delighted to be supporting Pestival, which will engage everyone with the vital role insects play in maintaining our way of life.”
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Is it a bee…is it a blackcab…NO it’s a beecab
Yes -designs are well underway to have Londons first beecab on the road by June.We all know how hard blackcab drivers work, collecting londoners and dropping them off at the right destination. It seems blackcabbies and bees both have ‘the knowledge’ when it comes to navigating their way around? Well yet again blackcab drivers are supporting the infrastructure of the city and are right behind our campaign to promote urban beekeeping here in the heart of the city at a time when bees need all the support they can get
