A giant, artificial hive programmed by real bees

The Hive, a summer installation in the U.K., uses communications in the park’s own beehives to control what happens inside the towering attraction

CONNECTING THE HIVES: Newly opened in London’s Kew Gardens, The Hive is an art and science installation that originally appeared in Milan as part of the United Kingdom’s award-winning contribution to the Italian city’s Expo 2015. Formed from hexagonal clusters of aluminum rods, its chaotic exterior is meant to resemble the honeybees’ swarming flights outside their hives. Its interior, which visitors can access through an entrance at the structure’s base, reflects the astonishing, be-combed order the insects build within. ACCELERATING THE VIBRATIONS: Honeybees communicate within their hives through vibrations. An “accelerometer” embedded in a rack within one of the park’s own beehives picks up these vibrations, amplifies and digitalizes them, and sends the electronic signals on to light and sound fixtures installed within the aluminum structure. As the bees’ communications undulate and shift due to such things as weather, time of day or seasonal conditions, the light and audio components pulse and buzz correspondingly.

THE BEE CRISIS: Healthy hives can teem with 20,000 to 40,000 bees apiece. But a global blight has decimated honeybee populations over the past decade, threatening the fruit and almond crops that rely on the industrious insects for pollination. The Kew Hive, which is expected to swarm with human visitors this summer, is meant in part to raise awareness of the crisis, says biologist Phil Stevenson, a plant chemistry researcher at the gardens. It will also press the message that other wild-bee species are equally critical for plant growth and in need of preservation.

THE NEXT STEP: Developed at Nottingham Trent University, the accelerometer may also be used in the near future to help monitor hives around the world for signs of distress. Stevenson says that Kew scientists are working to establish baseline vibrational signals produced by its healthy hives under various weather or seasonal conditions. Similar devices installed in apiaries elsewhere could detect deviations from these normal signals to warn of potential problems without having to open the hives.

FROM CHAOS TO SERENITY: For visitors entering the 17-metre-high Hive, the cacophony of sound and light it produces rises and falls with the busyness of the neighbouring bees. “You can actually occasionally hear the queen herself making these buzzing (commands),” says Stevenson, lead scientist for the Kew Hive project. But the overall effect is one of serenity. “There’s something sort of quite calming and mellow (about it),” he says. “You can just sort of get a sense of how the beginnings of the chaos that’s happening outside starts off with all this very well-organized structure (inside).”