Bees: A Story of Survival
Pollen sculpture
I’m probably kidding myself, but I like to think I know a little bit about the birds after 5 years escaping to the Welsh countryside, but an uplifting visit to the Liverpool World Museum revealed that I didn’t even know what I didn’t know about the bees. Fortunately, from the fact that these industrious little creatures have survived since the time of the dinosaurs, to the highly endearing knowledge that they have a honey stomach, “Bees: A Story of Survival” had the answers. Sadly, unlike the Bass Museum of Brewing History (now much missed), where you used to get beer tokens to round off your visit, there was no honey at the end of the exhibition, but in all other ways it was a fact-filled, sweet delight.
It’s our ears that are first engaged on walking into the exhibition, taking in a soundscape derived from the buzz of a beehive. Later our visual senses are engaged as we are first transported inside bee colony as the walls turn to honeycomb, and then given a chance to experience what a wildflower looks like from the perspective of a bee’s five eyes and 270 degree, but short-sighted, vision.
While the buzzing is instantly recognisable it all sounds like one big noise to the human oculus, particularly in the section that mimics the sense of being in the middle of swarm – when a queen bee splits a congested hive and sets out with up to 30,000 followers to find a new home. The bees themselves, however, recognise multiple different conversational vibration signals. By placing our chins on a metal plate the exhibition enables us to experience various signals, from a Dorsoventral Abdominal Vibration used to activate a new colony, to the whooping signal a startled bee makes when one of its comrades has headbutted it in lieu of a request for food; and the ‘tooting and quacking’ a Queen Bee makes to organise her colony.
What even this museum can’t simulate, however, is the fact that bees’ senses are connected, so they “see” smells and vice-versa, while also using pheromones to communicate with each other, leaving sky trails to the tastiest feeding grounds.
If that wasn’t enough, some flowers present the equivalent of runway lights in ultra-violet to guide hungry bees straight to their pollen. At this point, the electrostatic charge the bees have built up in flight ensures that some of that pollen sticks to the bees body, rather than making it into that honey stomach, and so can be inadvertently transferred to other flowers later. Ninety per cent of flowering plants and 75% of human crops depend on insect pollination.
Pretty much every nation regards bees as native, so prolific are they around the world and so adept at surviving in almost any conditions. Prior to the anthropocene, that is. After 100 million years of thriving in just about every habitat, pesticides – human manufactured chemicals originally designed to massacre fellow humans of a different tribe – are now wiping out bee colonies everywhere, but particularly in Europe and North America. 15,000 of the remaining 20,000 species of bee live in Asia or Latin America.
This life-affirming exhibition couldn’t end on a sad note, however, and so in the final rooms we are treated first to the most extraordinary ‘bee art’ – massively magnified images of the endlessly varied, ethereal shapes of an individual speck of pollen; and then to the chance to make our own bee art – a swarm of bees expanding and contracting in time to the movements of a human body. I found a nineties indie dance/flail produced an effect not dissimilar to a bird murmuration..
Altogether this was bee glorious and highly recommended for those able to visit Liverpool (which is rapidly becoming Britain’s best museum city outside of London) before May 2025.
markontour 
One Response to “Bees: A Story of Survival”
Brilliant. So much I didn’t realise before. Must go Liverpool Museum.
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