Wax Arts With Honeybees – Taking First Steps Toward Multispecies Co-Creation

Centuries of beekeeping restricted the honeybees’ role to a producer of raw material, such as honey or wax, which is then harvested and processed, resulting in all artistic value being added by humans. In this project, we regard honeybees (Apis mellifera) as co-creators and explore the joint creations of our two species. During our first season, we scoped the co-creative space over the course of four months. We present image material of sculptures that exceed bees’ natural building behavior and contribute preliminary insights on artifacts originating from human-bee co-creation. We reflect on how human-introduced wax shapes made the bees deviate from their regular comb forms and discuss future paths of multi-species co-creation, temporality, material as well as ethical aspects. Our preliminary insights raise questions to be developed in discussions with the TEI community and answered in future work during the upcoming bee seasons.

Conference paper