Category: Bees

Co-design with bees: choosing indicators

19/7/2013

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.

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New film: In conversation with bees

11/7/2013

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From our film-maker Marietta Galazka

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Co-design with bees: Looking bees in the eye

1/7/2013

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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’.

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Co-design with bees: Geographical Becomings

25/6/2013

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Our second workshop took place on the 31st May - 1st of June at Pershore College. We worked with the Evesham Beekeepers Association and Vale Heritage Landscape Trust to think through how the participatory action research approach might be extended to working with non-humans. This is the third in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Owain Jones.

I was struck by the following:

On one hand the intimacy of the relationship between the keepers and the bees insofar as the frame system lets the keepers, in effect, see into the working of the colony, even to the extent of seeing into the cells, seeing the queen in action, etc.; and on the other the otherness, the alieness, that exists between ‘becoming bee’ and ‘becoming human’.

The frame system seems very important to me insofar at it serves the above purposes for the keepers, e.g. monitoring hive health, but it also serves the bees well (as far as one can tell) quite simply as a place to make home. The technologies and practices of bee keeping have been shaped by bee agency over time insofar as it is a process of material, technological and habitual relational feedback/evolution. This process can perhaps be reflexively and technically refined and accelerated in ‘collaborative’ work with bees. The notions of various forms of biosensors to gather colony feedback offers some potential here.

I was struck by the attention to material and spatial detail - the size of the opening into the hive, which way the hives face in relation to each other. Also by the sensitivity to bee practice (such as slow moments, not standing in the flight path), and the notion of bee welfare not only for instrumental reasons but also for ethical reasons. The extraordinary socio-spatial habits of the colonies in terms of sex, learning and swarming show a rich forum of geographical becoming (as all animals do).

Dogs can clearly develop close emotional bonds with humans, and two-way communication. Through touch, sound, smell, and other senses, co-practice is commonplace and well developed. (The shared mammalness of both, the co-evolution of both are just two reasons for this). The intimacy between bees and humans (if it does exist) is of a different order, but in some respects at least, is no less significant.

The notion of beekeeping as more of a highly contested art, with perpetual openness for continued learning, than a settled and agreed practice, speaks to the great complexity of not only bees as a species, but also bees as embedded in ecology, and bees as embedded in the social and the adapted landscapes of modernity.

The issue of the super-organism and individual is a real challenge to thinking about human bee relationships as it is to other swarm, heard and flock animals. The Cartesian settlement of the human individual makes this challenging. Individual bees transmogrify from one part/function of the super-organism to another as they ‘grow up’.

If humans and bees are seen as agents in the (ecological) meshworks (Ingold) of life then we are already bound into conversations, perhaps, exchanges for sure, which have profound impacts on the flourishing (or otherwise), of both and of the meshwork itself.

In essence I think if we are to conduct conversations with bees we need the intermediaries of the experienced, empathetic, and open minded bee keepers. They are the ‘spokespersons’ that Latour feels are needed in the ‘parliament of things’. But they are not ‘representing fixed positions or facts, but conjectures and possibilities', and as Dobson (2010), observes, such a redefined ecological form of politics (and science) requires the development of new ways of listening, as well as new channels of speaking.

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Co-design with bees: I talk to the bees...

20/6/2013

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Bee fables: imagining more-than-human communities

17/6/2013

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Erik of het klein insectenboek

As part of our exploration of how our ideas of community might be reshaped to include bees as active participants, Johan Siebers has written a lovely piece exploring the role of bees in philosophy and literature.

This includes analyses of Godfried Bomans' Erik of het klein insectenboek, Virgil's Georgica, and Mandeville’s Fable of the bees, or: Private Vices, Public Benefits.

Read an excerpt and download the full paper just below.

When we look at the history of the bee in our consciousness we can see how, from the now obsolete religious disclosure of the world via the imperial monarchic imagination, bourgeois liberalism and the erasure of the unified horizon of signification in the 20th century, to the new striving for a human society without alienation that is not in conflict with nature but also does not give up its humanity, bees have accompanied us as the natural manifestation of the song we sing or buzz to ourselves, as a canvas for our hopes and our fears. We have lived with the bees and the bees have lived with us, from before we knew what that might one day mean.

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Co-design with bees: how bees change humans

8/6/2013

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Part of being attentive to the possibilities of more-than-human participation in research is watching out for the ways that the traditional division between human agents and non-human subjects gets complicated in real life practices. I had been keeping this in mind throughout our In Conversation with Bees workshop, since we had quite a few discussions about different methods of beekeeping (e.g. frame versus natural) and how this might be interfering with bees preferred behaviours. But scattered throughout the two days were also a wide range of examples of how bees also shape the behaviour of the humans who keep them.

Interacting with bees makes humans:

1.       Calm down. It didn’t seem this way at first. When us amateurs where putting on our protective suits for the first time there was definitely some nerves. But we had been told about the importance of keeping calm and relaxed while inspecting hives and so we tried out best. Interestingly, in informal conversations many of the beekeepers also talked about how they looked forward to doing their inspections because of how calm the whole process made them feel. So while we did have examples of humans trying to control their own moods, there was also a more relational understanding where the activity of the bees also encouraged particular responses in the humans

2.       Become more attentive to whole ecosystems. One beekeeper discussed the way that since they had started, they noticed they were much more aware of the wider environment, including what trees and plants were being grown, whether they were flowering early or late, and cycles in the weather. Another also mentioned how important it is to be aware of the yearly rhythms of potential predators. So forging connections with bees seemed to have a knock on effect of building connections with a much wider variety of living creatures and plants.

3.       Develop multiplying practices. One of the first comments at our workshop was the saying that if you put 10 bee-keepers in a room you’ll get 15 different ways of doing things. I thought it was really interesting that bees, which are often used as symbols of regimented order, actually inspire a proliferation of practices and knowledges in the humans that keep them.

4.       More intelligent. In a Victorian-era book about encouraging bee-keeping amongst the poor, the author claimed that even while bee-keeping might not always be a success it should be encouraged because it makes people more intelligent.

5.       Continuous learners. Paternalism aside, there were many comments about the way the practice of bee-keeping meant that you were always learning more and so always needed to be open to the ways that bees don’t fit with strict models.

6.       Drink less alcohol Bees don’t like the smell apparently, so bee-keepers need to moderate their intake, particularly the night before they do an inspection. I wondered how this might affect people’s social lives. Would one have to beg off from a night at the pub because the bees needed looking after in the morning?

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Conversations with Bees...

14/3/2013

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Brian Wolfe (CC BY-NC 2.0)

In connection with our forthcoming workshop on participatory research with bees, we recently read this post on ‘What is it like to be a Bee?’ from the Practical Ethics blog at Oxford University. It discusses an experiment where groups of bees were put into a high stress situation (being shaken for 60 seconds) and then given an ambiguous stimuli that was on a gradient between two smells that the bees had previously been trained to associate with ‘good’ or ‘bad’ consequences. The shaken up bees were less likely to taste the stimuli than the non-stressed bees, thus suggesting that bees can be pessimistic. Samples were also extracted from the stressed bees to test for chemical signals of negative emotions that might correlate with humans.

I was struck by the relatively sanguine attitude author Brian D. Earp had towards deliberatively subjecting bees to such high stress levels. It reminded me that, as Susan Hauri-Downing recently told me, ethics approvals are not required when researching with bees. Only creatures with a central nervous system (vertebrates), cephalopods such as octopus and squid, and adult decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobster and crayfish only) are included. So bees aren't currently recognised by ethics committees and so as Earp noted in his blog post, the idea that bees might have an inner emotional life could potentially ‘raise the morality alarm’. Given that our current project is focused around the idea of conversations, we wanted to share our conversation around this particular ‘moral alarm’.

First, Tim Collins suggested that a slightly different take on the life of bees, which we might want to explore, can be found in Mark Thompson’s work, an artist in Oakland CA who has been working with bees since the 1970s. Tim suggested that in contrast to the bee experiment discussed by Earp, Thompson provided an example of working with bees in a way that was built on intensive, immersive, conjoined actions across species. You can see more about this work here.

Johan Siebers was particularly struck by Earp’s statement in the blog that "human beings have a really handy self-report tool-language". He wrote:

I’m not sure which emoticon describes my all-shook up state after reading Earp’s, but I did display the same caution the manhandled bees exhibited towards their bittersweet treat.

I have been thinking in the context of our project about the question of why we find nothing more natural than to think of animals, and also plants, trees and even inanimate nature, as speaking. Are we trying to re-enchant the world and regain a sensibility that historically has been recorded in fables and myths? Do these stories tell us something about what we are looking for in our project? Or is the fable an attempt to colonise the alterity of non-human nature?

When we have a conversation, do we aim at a mutual coming-together, a consensus or a unification, or are conversations spaces in which an encounter with another as an other can take place? Two models of communication are at play here, one thinking in terms of communication as equalisation, the other in terms of communication as recognition of irreducible alterity.

What are the conditions for conversations in each of these cases? Which reflects more adequately what communication is? Is communication a disruptive and perhaps summoning encounter on the edge of untranslatability (I think Mark Thompson's bee film captures a lot of this) or the creation of a common world? Or is it the paradoxical dialectic between these poles? If so, what does that mean for conversations with more-than-human communities?

What happens, however, if we move away from the idea (assumed in Earp’s post) that a conversation presupposes language and that language in turn presupposes a shared social context - shared a 'form of life' (i.e. Wittgenstein’s famous line 'If a lion could speak, we could not understand him'). How do we avoid falling off the tight rope on the side of humanising the non-human or, alternatively, on the side of species-solipsism?

Maybe the fable promises more than we might think. The key term in the title of the oxford experiment could then turn out to be the word 'like': not 'what is it to be a bee?', but 'what is it like to be a bee'.

The 'like' points to the basic hermeneutical operation, for someone like Heidegger the basis of all significance, namely 'seeing something as something'. Maybe ‘likeness’ is a ontological feature that is more general, rather than only a linguistic operation. It pervades being as such.

Emotions could then perhaps also be understood in a different way from what the commentary on the experiment suggests. They are (again, Heidegger), Befindlichkeiten, ways of finding oneself. Emotions in this sense predate and presuppose the 'handy self-report tool' language, but they do exhibit the structure of 'like' in the sense that they require a distance, even if minimal, within the organism having the emotion in which it can have a relation to that emotion. This need not be conscious, but it is there as a gap in the occasion that the organism's present moment is. We have filled that gap with language - as we often do when there is a gap (language is a handy tool after all!). Maybe the bee is even wiser than that.

Heidegger would not agree that we can have a conversation with non-human organisms. Animals, for him, lack a world, because they lack language. But language is not our invention; it is certainly not a tool. Language allows the beings to come into the light of our recognition of them. For Heidegger we are the shepherds of all that is – he thus displays a fundamentally classical view of man as given over to the husbandry of the earth. We on the other hand are living with the aftermath of this classical view, in a culture that is drenched by the attempt to control nature, within and without us.

Our conversations with more than human communities would in my view first of all have to attempt to think 'conversing' as removed from the attempt to control or unify. In the rethinking of what emotions really are and that maybe we do share emotionality, not only with cats and dogs, but also with bees, and more, a possible avenue can be found.

But that would also commit us to a strong view of metaphysics, as revisionary: we have to rethink 'human', 'non-human', 'nature', 'emotion', 'language', 'conversation' in the light of a speculative philosophy about the nature of the real.

In response Tim wrote:

I wonder if 'thinking in terms of communication as equalisation' or 'recognition of irreducible alterity' doesn't ignore the potential for empathy to reshape the exchange? Language is like water it picks up bits and pieces, the flotsam and jetsom of ideas and vocalization from many cultures; can we rule out the potential for language to evolve beyond anthropocentric ideas that constrain communication to those that have the exact same combination of senses, memory, cognition and communication that we do?

The world is changing in lots of interesting ways. See below some notes on intelligence and awareness in plants from scientists which might be of interest.

Until recently modern mainstream science has been unwilling to consider ideas like sensory perception, communication, memory, agency and knowledge in plants. But there are some cracks in that armour. Prof Anthonty Trewavas has written a series of rigorous articles that explore ‘plant Intelligence’ (2003, arguing that plants are territorial and competitive; forever changing their ‘architecture, physiology and phenotype’ in the intelligent pursuit of resources for growth and reproduction. (Trewavas, 2005, p. 413). More recently Prof Daniel Chamovitz (2012) argues for awareness (rather than intelligence). Making a case at the bio-chemical level for specific sensory perceptions, that enables response to changes in the environment as well as memory and communication amongst plants. It is important to note that this work has vociferous critics, Richard Firn’s response to Trewavas’ 2003 paper, makes a point-by-point rebuttal before demanding limitation on anthropocentric description. (2004)

We’re looking forward to taking these conversations further in our Conversations with Bees workshop in May.

Michelle Bastian

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Edited collection now available

Co-design with bees: choosing indicators

New film: In conversation with bees

Co-design with bees: Looking bees in the eye

Co-design with bees: Geographical Becomings

Co-design with bees: I talk to the bees...

Bee fables: imagining more-than-human communities

Co-design with bees: how bees change humans

Conversations with Bees...

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