Well, I really meant to write bioaesthetics, but since today’s musings relate entirely to bees, we might as well go with bee aesthetics. Bioaesthetics is the scientific field that seeks to understand how humans develop an appreciation of art, derived from their interaction with the environment. Bees have been a large part of these explorations, with scientists particularly interested in the fact that humans depicted bees since art’s beginnings, long before we all became so worried about their potential extinction.

Most of what I am presenting today I learned from an international team of ecologists led by an Australian researcher who calls her self Bee Babette – how can you not love that name…. Kit S. Prendergast and her colleagues looked at representations of all kinds of bees and bumblebees across history, starting with cave drawings, and ending with contemporary film and video games, with everything in between.

They, like so many of us, are concerned with the fact that bees are on the decline due to a variety of factors including natural habitat fragmentation, urbanization, climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture. But they also observed that bee’s gifts to humanity – their pollination, their honey, their wax, made them important throughout the ages. I will leave out the discussions of “neuro-aesthetic appreciation of art in a biologically plausible evolutionary framework … (researchers) thus evaluate how early forms of meaningful communication may utilise existing neural mechanisms and enable contemporary aesthetic art appreciation.” Instead I’ll focus on forms of representation, interspersed with the photographs of (bumble)bees I took in the fields. (You’re welcome….)

The importance of bees is clearly in evidence cross-culturally, and found its way into the arts of many diverse population groups across time. You see bees in 8000-year-old Egyptian hieroglyphs, in European cave art in Spain and on ancient Greek coins, and in religious or spiritual representations across the globe. Bees were symbolized in the Americas long before the colonialists arrived, integrated into Mayan ceremonies. First Nations people in Australia have used the motif of bees for over 65.000 years, found in their oral histories, ceremonies and construction of didgeridoos and their rock art. Bees became an important design feature during the Napoleon era in France, the imperial bee symbolizing the higher-level hardworking goals Napoleon wanted the republic to achieve. Jewelry across the world has represented bees in various configurations.

You find paintings of bees in China even before the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644. Architecture has used the structure of the beehive from domed Celtic huts, south African Bantu dwellings, Gaudi’s parabolic arches, to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hanna-Honeycomb House. Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes are modeled after bee habitats and found hexagonal heirs in the Eden Project Biomes by Grimshaw Architects (Cornwall, England; 2000–2001), and the world’s largest open air geodesic dome which serves as the headquarters of the American Society for Metals (ASM) International by John Terrence Kelly (Ohio; 1958). (Again, all this can be found in incredible detail with image sources here.)

Renaissance painters used the bee motif in landscape and religious paintings ubiquitously. Fast forward to the 20th century, Joseph Beuys was an ardent admirer of bees and incorporated them into his art practice in multiple ways, using bees wax as well as honey for his paintings and installations. In his wake, multiple artists across Europe started interactive installations with live bees and sculpture combined. One of the most integrated shows is now on view in Liverpool’s World Museum. Wolfgang Buttress’ Bees: A Story of Survival. The video clip show some of the audio-visual experiences that takes you right into the sight and sounds of the bees’ world. One of his previous installations, The Hive at Kew Gardens, is a favorite of mine.

Photo credit: architectsjournal.co.uk

The Hive’s mesh frame is constructed from 170,000 aluminium parts and 1,000 LED lights, which light up according to the vibrations of the bees in the surrounding wildflower meadows. In turn, it activates musical notes in the key of C – the key bees buzz in – with you standing inside this 17 meters high structure, as if in a hive. Check it out, next you visit! It’s awe- inspiring.

And if you can’t travel, the beauty of bees is all around you – easily observed in the late summer fields.

Music today is Schubert’s bee. And for good measure my favorite flight of the bumble bee version from the movie Shine.