{"id":1127,"date":"2015-05-06T06:30:31","date_gmt":"2015-05-06T06:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/?p=1127"},"modified":"2015-05-06T19:48:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T19:48:01","slug":"tracing-the-hum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/2015\/05\/06\/tracing-the-hum\/","title":{"rendered":"Tracing the hum"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Rob<\/a>

{credit}Rob Flynn\/USDA{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Consider the honeybee. Not as an automaton in a honey factory, but as a remarkable social insect and pollinator indissolubly tied to food security \u2014 and to the artistic imagination. So asks the poet John Burnside<\/a>\u00a0in his incisive essay on the bee in culture in this week\u2019s Books and Arts<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Burnside points out how, as colony collapse disorder<\/a> decimates hives worldwide, poets and artists are revealing anew the multifaceted relationship of the bee and us. The subtly beautiful limited-edition artbook Melissographia<\/i>, a collaboration between Burnside and British multimedia artist Amy Shelton<\/a>, for instance, interweaves poems, pollen maps, botanical samples and illustrations.<\/p>\n

\"Detail<\/a>

Detail of Amy Shelton\u2019s Florilegium: Honey Flow. Spring, 2014. {credit}John Melville{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

Shelton notes on her website that she works in the \u201cstrong artistic tradition in England of ‘unseen landscapes’\u201d by focusing on the beehive \u2014 \u201ca locus of wildness fusing with human culture\u201d. The lightbox installations of Shelton\u2019s Florilegium: Honeyflow<\/i> illuminate scores of nectar-rich wildflower specimens in the order they bloom through the bee season \u2014 in the process spotlighting the loss of 97% of Britain\u2019s wildflower meadows in the past 75 years<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Shelton also runs Honeyscribe<\/i><\/a>, an educational project offering children the chance to learn about our dependence on pollinators and the wonders of the hive.\u00a0(One eight-year-old attendee, Shelton tells me, said of standing near the beehives that \u201cit was like it was snowing bees. It was beautiful.\u201d)<\/p>\n

In ancient Egypt, honeyscribes monitored the harvests of the hives. But the bee, fierce as well as beneficent, was also symbolically tied to royalty. As the emblem of lower Egypt, the insect became part of the iconography of governance: that region\u2019s crown, the deshret<\/i><\/a>, sports a spring-like protuberance resembling a bee\u2019s proboscis.<\/p>\n

\"Epithet<\/a>

Epithet on limestone plaque from the temple of Ramesses II at Abydos, 13th century BC (British Museum, London). The bee symbolises lower Egypt.{credit}Barbara Kiser{\/credit}<\/p><\/div>\n

The bee had meanwhile ascended to divine status in preclassical Aegean civilisations. Some islands seem to have buzzed with bee-goddess cults, as seventh-century BC finds\u00a0from Crete<\/a>\u00a0and Rhodes<\/a> hint.<\/p>\n

Underneath these lofty goings-on, the honeybee remained knitted in to quotidian existence round the world, as Eva Crane <\/a>(1912-2007) documented in classics such as the World History of Beekeeping and Honey Hunting<\/i> <\/a>(1999; reprinted 2011). (Crane, a quantum mathematician, directed the International Bee Research Association for 35 years and worked on apian science in more than 60 countries.)<\/p>\n

Crane\u2019s research points to the Aegean as a fountainhead of beekeeping. I recently had a visceral reminder of the region\u2019s elemental and ongoing link to bees in Mani, one of the tattered ribbons of land that blow south from the Peloponnese. As I walked the flank of the rock-strewn Sangias range among wild orchids, scabious and euphorbia, the earth itself seemed to reverberate. \u00a0It was the hum of millions of honeybees at work round the wooden hives of village cooperatives. Apis mellifera<\/i>, still only half-tamed, remains at home in this ferocious landscape.<\/p>\n

Amy Shelton\u2019s lightbox artworks, Florilegium: Honey Flow<\/i>, can be seen at the Wellcome Kitchen, the Wellcome Collection\u2019s new restaurant at 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE, UK<\/abbr>.<\/b><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

For Nature’<\/em>s full coverage of science in culture, visit www.nature.com\/news\/booksandarts<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consider the honeybee. Not as an automaton in a honey factory, but as a remarkable social insect and pollinator indissolubly tied to food security \u2014 and to the artistic imagination. So asks the poet John Burnside\u00a0in his incisive essay on the bee in culture in this week\u2019s Books and Arts.  Read more<\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3353,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,43,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1127","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apiculture","category-archaeology","category-arts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3353"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1127"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1127\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1127"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1127"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.nature.com\/aviewfromthebridge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1127"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}