In his wonderfully entitled book ‘The Dancing Bees’ Karl von Frisch tells us about the language of the honeybee (for which he received the Nobel Prize together with the equally famous ethologists, Niko Tinburgen and Konrad Lorenz).  So when we decided on holding a workshop on ‘Conversations with Bees’ we were in good company, discussing and talking to the bees, but what did the bees tell us?

I always thought that bees express the substance of life, the buzz of nature, a metaphor for the buzz of humanity and after the workshop remain even more convinced that they should be more highly regarded as indicators of a healthy environment; discussing how bees communicate, navigate, their needs and their decline, seemed to say much about our relationship with the world. Traditionally you talk to the bees, tell them about family matters, births and bereavements, the bees respond in producing honey.  But back to the workshop, much discussion about monitoring bee populations, how they forage, their health and survival, urban bees and questions about how we might embrace bees as natural indicators of a healthy environment having the foresight to move beyond conventional narrowly focused social and economic indicators to placing other indicators alongside and giving them equal weight.

Discussion moved onto bee gardens, transportable apiaries located throughout the city; in Birmingham we decided that we should monitor the conversations, set up a live stream video cam of bee activities, perhaps even be able to observe the bees dancing, invite people to log onto the site and view it all on the giant screen in the city centre! Instead of the standard corporate advertising or usual messages, there for all to see, would be the natural world of the honeybee expressing our understanding of nature, our desire to embrace the bees as indicators, relaying our messages and observations. Have a look at the Bee Skyscraper in Buffalo, USA

So the workshop on honeybees required us to consider our human existence and current relationships with the world, to build upon a very old one to co-design an intervention by understanding more fully a ‘bee perspective’ which prompts us to consider what other perspective currently lie outside our experience and what other metaphorical or real bee type conversations remain to be experienced and explored.

Thanks to Pershore College, the opportunity to renew old acquaintances and make new ones with the bees.

From our film-maker Marietta Galazka

I came to the ‘In conversations with bees’ workshop with both expectancy and dread. I was very much looking forward to meeting the bees, but I was also afraid. While I was putting on the white suite, I was feeling rather apprehensive: I did not know whether the bees would accept my presence, I did not know how to look at them in the eyes or how to predict their reactions. In other words, I had no clue how to listen or talk to bees. I just hoped that I could rely on my alien-like suite to fend off possible attacks. Once at the hive, I was conscious that - as advised by our guides - I needed to move calmly and take care not to interfere with the bees’ activities. This focussed my attention on them and their actions, at which point I started forgetting my fearful feelings, and I started marvelling at their beauty and amazing works instead. This makes me think that overcoming the barriers that prevent us from sharing the same space with and becoming aware of the ‘other’ has to be the first step towards participatory research. With dogs we could take this space-sharing and mutual awareness more or less for granted, but certainly not with bees (not for me anyway). Unlike with dogs - who can return our gaze and whose gaze we can return, who have lived among us for millennia and whom we have trained to respond in ways we deem appropriate (or else!) - for most of us simply sharing the same space with bees is an ability that has to be developed.

It seems that many people are aware of how important bees are for humans and how dramatically they are declining; but while most are keen for someone to help bees recover, they don’t want to be around bees (including my neighbours!). However, at the workshop I learnt that cities, so typically human spaces, have now become more hospitable for bees than the open countryside, because they provide a variety of vegetation from gardens which bees need but which the country has lots due to extensive farming. So, ironically, it seem that finding ways of bringing people to share the same spaces with and acquiring proper awareness of bees has become almost a necessity for the sake of humanity as well as the bees themselves. This seems to me an opportunity for participatory research to widen the focus from co-designing with bees individual hives (as we saw that some researchers have done) to co-designing with humans and bees new ways of constructing space-sharing and mutual awareness abilities and practices at a systemic level, to create new hybrid urban models. Pervasive and ubiquitous computing technology is rapidly transforming the model of the city into that of the ‘smart city’…perhaps in this transition, intertwined with the smart city of humans, we will also see the emergence of the ‘smart city of bees’.