Humans have watched and admired the life and behaviour of bees since the dawn of time. We have built their hives and collected their sweet and golden honey. We have studied the relationships between bees and flowers, studied their diversity and studied their importance as pollinators. We have learned that bees not only create the colours of nature, but also make critical contributions for almost everything we eat.
In Denmark today, we know of 33 genera of bees which can be further divided into 296 species. We distinguish between the honey bee and the wild bee species, which are mostly solitary. Worldwide, 20,000 species of bees have been described, of which only a handful produce honey. We know a lot about bees. Yet they remain enigmatic and continue to surprise us. You can never tell with bees, says Winnie the Pooh.
But are we taking good care of the bees? Or have we literally fertilised the ground with our monocultures for a coming disaster that will have fatal consequences for both bees and us? We are being hit with alarming news about what the absence of bees or the destruction of their biosphere will mean for the future of the planet. All of a sudden, the bee family we have so carefully nurtured may disappear.
These are questions we are far from being able to explain or answer in this exhibition. The exhibition springs from joy and awe that bees exist, and tries to give artistic form to the life of bees. But the fact that the behaviour of bees – which has changed significantly in recent years – mirrors the state of the planet, and that scientists see bees as flying probes that return with gloomy reports about the future, suggests that we have everything to learn from the little winged insect.
This exhibition lets us see the world through the prism of bees. An exhibition about the bees seems obvious right now, if we are to focus sharply on our way of life and what opportunities we have to survive on our planet with limited resources. Perhaps it is from the bees that we can learn something about how to deal with the world without destroying it. The exhibition embarks on an artistic and scientific journey to find answers using poetry, design, art, anthropology and history to guide us in becoming agents and participants in bee’s lives.