The human-sized bee hive at Kew Gardens.
Take a trip to Kew Gardens this summer and you’re in for an immersive, bee-themed treat. For, among the pristine, landscaped gardens, towers Wolfgang Buttress’s 40-tonne installation The Hive, recently moved here from the UK Pavilion at the 2015 Milan Expo.
The Hive spirals 17 metres out of the ground like a swarm of honeybees, but as you get closer it takes on the form of a working honeybee hive, complete with thousands of lights and a soundscape linked by sensors to a living beehive within the gardens.
There are two entrances - starting in the bowels of the hive, where you learn about honeybees and their role as pollinators. Here, immersive activities include biting sticks inserted into a conductor to 'sense’ vibrations through the bones in your head.
“It’s like a play area for adults,” says Miranda Janatka, one of Kew’s botanical horticultural diploma students, who planted the wildflower meadows and hedges around the installation, and who showed me around.
But there’s an enormous educational element, too: when biting the stick and inserting it into the conductor (which is no mean feat), Miranda encouraged me to close my eyes and put my fingers in my ears, so I could fully engage with the vibrational messages honeybees make to each other.
I 'experienced’ combative quacking signals emitted by virgin queen bees in a quest to be the queen of the hive, dog-like begging vibrations for food, and the famous waggle dance, which honeybees use to reveal the location of a food source to each other.
All of these are usually heard only by scientists working closely with honeybees in laboratories and were completely new to me. Here they are laid bare for everyone to experience.
Upstairs the hive gets even more exciting, as it’s wired up to, and is therefore completely controlled by, the working honeybee hive within Kew Gardens. I visited The Hive on a cooler-than-average, cloudy Wednesday morning in June. The relevance? The bees weren’t as active as they would have been had I visited in glorious sunshine, but more so than if I had been there in pouring rain.
Yet the experience was still magnificent. As I stood in the centre of the hive, slightly disorientated from standing on a floor of see-through, hexagonal tiles, I looked up to a whirlwind of aluminum - through which I could see sky and overhead planes - and flashing pink LED lights, each one responding to the movement of a bee within the hive.
The accompanying sound track of low humming complemented the other-worldly feeling of being inside a working hive among the tree tops, and there were further buttons to press, linking me to the vibrational messages that I learned about a few minutes previously, only this time being made in real time from the live colony of honeybees in the gardens.
The Hive promised to be nothing less than spectacular, and it didn’t disappoint. There’s a key message to the fantasy - and that is that bees are in trouble and need our help.
Visitors are guided to The Hive along pathways cut through meadows of pollinator-friendly plants and native hedgerows - two habitats that have declined massively in the wild due to agricultural intensification - and there are information boards and dedicated 'Hive Explainers’ on hand to inform visitors about the role of bees in the ecosystem, and how they relate to us.
But it’s designed to look good, too, inspiring gardeners everywhere to take heed and help the bees, without compromising on aesthetics. There are two types of meadow: one, described by Miranda as a rough landscape mix, with 34 native species including red clover and ragged robin, the other - closer to the Hive and presumably more photo-friendly - with “added bling”; a few double-flowered cultivars to “pretty it up a bit”.
Is that necessary? “Well, the nice thing about this project is that we’ve really thought about it,” Miranda says. “Not only does it look good, and is a pleasant spot to sit down and enjoy a summer picnic, but we’ve created real habitats for real wildlife”.
The British-grown native hedges include hawthorn and blackthorn - foraging and nesting habitat for a variety of birds, and caterpillar fodder for a number of moth species. “Yes, there’s a bit of added bling but there are no fewer native species as a result,” says Miranda. “It’s about balance.”
My only complaint is that, as magnificent and educational as The Hive is, it focuses on just one of our 250-odd species of British bees, with only scattered references to bumblebees and solitary bees, some of which live in underground social nests and others which make individual nesting cells in anything from a beetle hole in an old tree, to an empty snail shell. Bees are in trouble and The Hive will go a long way to educate the public as to how we can help them, but we ignore the other 249 bees at our peril.