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’.

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 second in a series of reflections on the workshop from our participants and is written by Phil Jones.

In the Goon Show, Eccles famously sang “I talk to the trees... that's why they put me away”.  Talking to beekeepers while trying to set up this workshop, I felt everyone was looking at me like I was a crazy person: “We want to talk to the bees and find out what they want us to research...”

Participatory Action Research (PAR), as a technique, displaces the expert power of the academic, working with different communities to identify issues of common interest, devise strategies to research these topics and jointly come up with solutions to problems.  Communities involved in PAR sometimes struggle to think of themselves as ‘experts’ and can be really intimidated by being asked to sit down and talk to academics.  I felt this was even harder when trying to apply PAR approaches to talking to bees – you have to convince people working with bees that you’re not joking, not crazy and that there’s something interesting to be gained by trying to ‘talk to’ bees in this way.

The most striking thing that came out of this workshop for me was how bees are ‘spoken for’ by other people.  Stories of bee extinction and various anthropomorphic representations of bees (including the knitted bee that I used as the logo for the workshop) make people generally quite sympathetic to bees.  But the reality of getting up close and personal with a hive – the noise, the need to stay calm and still while they crash and bang into your protective veil – can be quite scary at first.  The stories we tell about bees change how we engage with this species.  It seemed very productive therefore to flip this around and try to think about what the bees say.  Indeed, we ended up with some very interesting ideas for projects with this most sensitive of indicator species for general ecological wellbeing.  But even at the end of the second day I still felt a little bit like I was playing the role of crazy academic, having to apologise to non-academics (including the bees!) for the rather strange day out we were having...

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?