Friday Destination: My fascination with bees

There are many hobbies which are likely to result in death. According to the National Ski Area Association, there are about 40 fatal skiing accidents each year. The point is that the thrill of flying down the slopes for some, or the fascination of bees for me, far outweighs the risk that may be involved.

BEES AS UTOPIAN SOCIALISTS

The comparison of beehives to human civilization has been made throughout history, especially in the mid-19th century, when commercial beekeeping started to kick in. One of the more impressive aspects of a beehive is how all the bees work together for the common good. It is the single driving force behind the life of the colony. A hive is a complex system that runs without the benefit of individual leadership. The queen is really no more than an egg-laying slave — she does not govern the hive. The bees have specific assigned tasks that evolve over their relatively short lives. There are nurse bees, bees that clean, funerary bees that remove other dead bees and bees that collect pollen and nectar. It is selfless, collective, common purpose that unites the colony.

THE BEE AS DESIGNER

The traditional image of a beehive is really a skep, which is a basket made of coils of grass or straw. Skeps were used mainly in Europe up until the mid-19th century. The structure of honeycomb is a feat of precision, engineering and strength, a mass of hexagonal wax cells built by honey bees to contain larvae and stores of honey and pollen. To produce wax, bees must process about eight pounds of honey for one pound of wax. It is estimated bees fly 150,000 miles, roughly six times around the earth, to yield that single pound. In the natural world bees build comb into some of the most beautiful undulating shapes, rivaling any building by Frank Gehry.

THE BEE AS BRAND

Throughout human history, bees and honey have been potent religious symbols. Today bees and skep beehives — representing strength and industry — are used as a brand for thousands of businesses around the world. This all comes together in the state of Utah, whose particular obsession with the hive is rooted in Mormon iconography, in which the beehive is a symbol of the Kingdom of God. Not only does the beehive represent religious fervor, it is the state seal and brand for many a Utah company, ranging from Beehive, purveyors of “meat recovery and separator equipment,” to Beehive Pipe Products, a supplier of pipe fittings. The Salt Lake Bees are a minor-league baseball team based in Salt Lake City.

THE SCIENCE OF BEES

Bees were the first creatures examined by 17th-century scientists using early microscopes. Artist and photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher has published Bee, a book of amazing photographs she took of bees with a scanning electron microscope. Of these otherworldly images, Fisher writes in the book’s forward, “For me, the honeybee symbolizes and embodies a congruency of form and function, vision and action, spirit and matter, all being of the same essence.”

THE COLOR OF HONEY

Honey is produced in most countries around the world. If all you have ever tasted is the bland grocery store variety, you are missing out on the rich and varied experience of honey. Color and flavor are determined by the types of flower blossoms the bees visit. There are more than 300 unique types of honey in the United States alone. It is said that eating local unprocessed honey is a good remedy for allergies. The honey I get from local wildflowers in upstate New York is light in spring, and by early fall has turned to a deep, rich amber that glows with the light of a late summer afternoon.

Click here for a brief tour of my apiary.

Mark Randall is a principal of Worldstudio, a marketing and design firm. In association with Adobe Foundation, Worldstudio guides Design Ignites Change, which engages high school and college students in multidisciplinary design projects that address pressing social issues (and which Felt & Wire most recently covered here). In addition to lecturing on design and social responsibility at schools and conferences, Randall has taught at Parson’s School of Design, Fordham University and Hartford University. Randall is the chair of Impact! Design for Social Change, a six-week summer intensive at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has also served on the national board of AIGA.