The Transparent Beehive is a living sculpture in the form of an observation beehive made from plexiglass, wood, aluminium and steel. Inside is a living bee colony that has access to the outside world through a plexiglass pipe. The Transparent Beehive was installed for the first time on a Brussels rooftop connected to an urban garden laboratory and has since been shown in various art contexts. It has helped to produce a variety of art works including sound works, visual images, and bee artifacts.

the Transparent Beehive at the Bee Laboratory in Brussels
Transparent Beehive, the Movie – on vimeo

The beehive is internally structured like a book, as inspired by a design from 1788 by the Swiss entomologist Francis Huber, in order to make it easy to open the hive for inspections and for filming the activity of the bees inside the nest. Each page consists of a wooden frame covered by an aluminium casing and mounted on dry-lubricated sliders. Bees spontaneously build honeycomb structures on the frame.

Each wooden frame is enhanced with microphones which pick up the vibrations and sounds of the hive. They are sonified and made audible helping to monitor the health and development of the bee colony. Cameras inside the hive monitor the growth of the wax structures and the activity of bees. Additional sensors measure temperature, humidity, and other microclimate measures. Data is treated by sensory processing, pattern recognition and AI algorithms and visualized using sophisticated computer graphics algorithms in order to make the state of the colony tangible.

Sound is an important aspect of the Transparent Beehive sculpture. The microphones inside the beehive monitor continuously the colony’s buzz. When the sculpture is shown without a living bee colony, the Transparent beehive sound file is played. It is an elaboration of the field recordings made in the broodnest of the Transparent Beehive for a complete season, starting with recordings on june 21st, the longest day / shortest night, and edited into a 15 minutes-piece using Max/MSP.
The increase and decrease of swarm activity in the hive and its influence on the buzzing sound produced by the colony is the main thread for the transformation of the recordings. I thus use natural phenomena as musical tools and, in retrospect, musical tools as an artistic rendition or analysis of natural phenomena. The audio work embodies the bee swarm intersected simultaneously with swirling electronic sound clusters.

Background
The Transparent Beehive is a living sculpture, part of a series of ecological instrumented beehives leading towards a fully biocompatible intelligent beehive. The Transparent Beehive allows the Brussels Urban Bee Laboratory to study the tight interaction between city honeybees and urban ecosystems, using artistic research practices and in collaboration with scientists.

My preoccupations with bees come partly from a fascination with these amazing insects: Bees exhibit very original solutions to the challenges that social insects face, e.g. on the level of communication and collective decision making. They are an endless source of visually stunning images and sounds and their remarkable collective behavior provides inspiration and metaphors for the functioning of human society.

I have also another motivation. In many industrialised nations, bee colonies are now threatened. There are many causes – amongst them pesticides and parasites – but the compromised state of the foraging areas for bees is just as worrisome. So I work also towards an improvement of the environment of bees with the creation of urban gardens and guerilla planting and I use bees as bio-indicators to make citizens aware of the increasingly negative effects of our life styles and methods of industrial production.
All research info on: http://urbanbeelab.okno.be