Laura's Art Blog, Exploring the Material World

I’m a sucker for color charts. Mervi Hjelmroos-Koski has written a nice post about pollen color (which includes a link to this peach of a chart) for the botanical illustration blog she writes for the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Thank you, Mervi!

From “The Pollen Loads of the Honeybee” by Dorothy Hodges

There’s a brilliant happiness essay in today’s NYTimes, Oh, Sting, Where Is Thy Death? by Richard Conniff. It’s about the Justin O. Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Entomologist Schmidt, who’s worked with all kinds of stinging insects, expertly rates their stings by level and variety of pain.

According the the Schmidt scale, a honeybee sting is “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin,” while a yellowjacket’s is “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.”

There’s a great article about collapsing bee colonies at Salon.

The Sister Bee trailer is now available on YouTube. You’re warmly invited to share.

It’s been a long time coming, but Sister Bee finally has a new website all her own. You can check it out here. The site includes biographies of the Sister Bee beekeepers, information about the soundtrack and She Said, a retrospective blog about the making of Sister Bee including quotes and outtakes like these:

It’s wonderful to see… life!

- Mery Molenaar

I’m a beekeeper. Um hmm… The bees keep me.

– Marge McLellan

Some of the hardest lessons, the best lessons, have come from making dumb mistakes.

- Patricia Butler

How do bees construct wax comb so perfectly?

They use their bodies as measuring tools, sometimes holding hands, making great chains of bees.

The process is called “festooning” and it’s wonderful to see. In the picture below, you can see a small festoon has formed to measure the distance from bottom of comb to the edge of the frame.

Here it is again, close up.

I took this next picture by looking down into a hive after disturbing the measuring process by removing a frame.

The broken chain reformed immediately, taking into account the new distance between combs.

Though it’s easy to see them in action here, their way of thinking, their way of processing the information they get from festooning, is a mystery to me.

One of my favorite shapes is that of naturally drawn wax comb. It’s the edges that thrill me. They’re rounded, precise and have a beautiful way of approaching boundaries, sometimes touching edges and sometimes not, always with grace and intelligence.

Foundationless brood comb

It’s a shape I think about a lot, and one that occurs over and over again in my painting. Here it is in 2008.

“Elephant,” encaustic and ink on panel

And 2007.

“Haystack,” encaustic, colored pencil and watercolor on panel

And again…

“Mars,” encaustic on birch

Often, when people think about bee comb, hexagons come to mind (understandable so). But it’s roundness, I think, that best describes the shape of the bees.

Feral colony found in an owl house. Photo essay here.

There’s a new pastime taking shape in our household. Making beeswax soap! It’s a work in progress. We’re still tweaking the recipe, aiming for a simple beekeeper’s soap that’s nice on the skin while appealing to the bees’ gentler side.

Propolis, beeswax and honey soap

Bees are exquisitely tuned in to scent. Human body odor and the breath of humans and other mammals can trigger aggressive behavior. The scent of old stings on bee clothes and gloves can also rile ‘em up. Lemongrass is a turn on, similar chemically to a scent produced by the queen. We started using lemongrass mist around the hive about a year ago instead of smoke and they seem to find it fascinating. It calms them. Hopefully, hands washed with lemongrass soap will be calming too.

Soapmaking is fun once you get past the fear of lye. There’s something alchemical about it, watching oils and wax go from solid to liquid and back again. Beeswax, in all its forms, evokes alchemy, I think. There’s the process of its making. Sunlight to flower to nectar to bee to honey to wax. Artists who use wax in their work understand how beeswax, in particular, changes things. It adds a singular depth and a warm, lively sheen to every surface it coats. Goldenness.

A lavender soap flower

As Marge McLellan says in Sister Bee, “It’s all just so… beautiful!”

There’s a nice little community of encaustic painters forming on twitter. I joined back in January, totally skeptical, and am now totally hooked. You can find me there @LauraLovesLux & if you’re a painter or a beekeeper or just plain interesting, I’d be delighted to follow you. I like using it as a search engine (smarter, wittier than Google). It’s part oracle, part entertainment broadcast. The term “micro-blogging” doesn’t do it justice. You’ve got to invest some time, a few hours spread over a week or two, before the magic unfolds.

Lisa Sisley-Blinn has done the encaustic world a kindness by compiling a list of artists who tweet. (Thank you, Lisa!) Her blog’s worth checking out too. As is Lorraine Glessner’s who also tweets.

P.S. Bee people to follow… @AFBR (Florida beekeeper, posts photos of bee removals) and @bug_girl (cool links plus entomological snark).

Honeybee foraging on white sweet clover in Boulder, Colorado.

It takes the nectar of two million flowers to make a pound of honey. Bees have to eat eight pounds of honey to produce a single pound of beeswax. So that’s 16 million flowers that go into each pound of beeswax.

Holy cow.

The photo above was taken in 2006, a gangbusters year for clover. Each tiny blossom counts as a separate flower.

One of the cool things about being a beekeeper is that people know you go for stuff like this.

Our friend Judy found this gorgeous wasps’ nest in the tree by her front door in Boulder last year. She was kind enough not to poison it and let it hang outside as hair-raising entertainment all summer long. (Brave woman!) We collected it after the wasps died naturally in the fall.

My first impulse, once we got it home, was to cut it open! (I’m terribly curious to see what it looks like inside. Aren’t you?) But the wavy patterns in the paper, and the inclusion of twigs and leaves into the body of the nest are so beautifully made, I’ve yet to bring myself to take it apart.

In the BBC costume drama Wives and Daughters there’s a scene where the romantic lead, a budding naturalist, brings a wasps’ nest home to his steadfast love interest Molly. It’s a powerful image, the empty paper nest. A gray vessel; round, rattling; full of phantom stings.

UPDATE 3/4/09
These are most likely bald faced hornets, not paper wasps. Have changed title accordingly.

Two hunks of honeybee propolis 1/22/09

There’s a neat article about honeybee propolis and HIV in Secrets of the City. For those unfamiliar… propolis (a.k.a. bee glue) is a sticky substance made of tree resin by honeybees to coat and protect the inside of the hive. It’s got potent anti-viral and anti-bacterial properties. It’s wonderful, lively, fragrant stuff.

My favorite quote from the article:

There’s this peculiar relationship that exists between bees and certain individuals. It’s primal and ancient. There are rock paintings of the interaction between humans and bees in Europe, Africa, and Asia from 8000 to 2000 B.C. That’s how far back this goes…

- Marla Spivak

Amen.

I’ve been thinking more about this painting by Hieronymus Bosch.

It has a wonderful bee-like quality, don’t you think? All those people! Doing all that stuff! All those honeybees! All that stuff!

Snow! We got our first real dumping of the season here in Boulder, Colorado yesterday (a 7-incher) and it’s as fluffy as snow can be. One of the most interesting things about snowflakes is how they’re nearly always formed in the shape of a hexagon, not unlike the wax comb made by bees.

According to Michael Schneider, author of the spellbinding art/math book, “A Beginner’s Guide to Constructing the Universe,”

Hexagons contain a message that efficient structure, function and order are occurring… The appearance of crystalline snowflakes is why scientists consider water a mineral. As the temperature drops, H2O molecules vibrate more slowly, slow enough for electric charges within each molecule to attract other molecules and tighten into a hexagonal, close-packed arrangement. More molecules build upon the seed pattern to become beautiful snowflakes, blanketing the world with six-fold symmetry.

I love this book so much, I’ve included a link below. It’s a thought provoking compendium of geometry, art and philosophy.

Another book you might enjoy is “Snow Crystals” by W.A. Bentley and W.J. Humphreys. It’s a picture book – hundreds of snow crystals – photographed in 1901 & ’02. You can check out some of the images here. They are mesmerizing.

Don’t you just love road trips? I had the pleasure of tripping it up to Nebraska for a Sister Bee screening at the Chemical Free Beekeeping Conference right before Thanksgiving. Here are some images from the road.

I’m a nature girl so it’s usually grass and trees that ensnare me. But on this particular trip, trucks ruled. Their primary logos read like emblems from a distant kingdom. My favorites had a map or puzzle-like quality to them. But I enjoyed the simple ones too. And the cattle trucks were exquisite. From a distance they look like simple metal grids. But get close and you can see eyes, noses & hides peeking through.

Great food for painting.

Special thanks to Michael Bush of Bush Farms for hosting such a thought provoking show. I learned some interesting new/old things about beeswax & look forward to posting them soon.