Plan Bienen recently travelled to Liverpool for the Libidinal Circuits: Scenes of Urban Innovation conference organised by the International Association for the Study of the Culture of Cities (Toronto) with the University of Liverpool and FACT, 8-10 July. Arriving via train, bus and ferry, Tessa delivered a paper on Day 3 titled ‘Plan Bienen: Trading Futures in the More-Than-Human City’.
During her stay Tessa was hosted in a local housing co-op by the very special Steph through BeWelcome.
Last week we had the opportunity to present a paper at the Aesthetics After Finitude symposium in Sydney. Our performative lecture, ‘Disappearing Bees’, developed ideas that were percolating during our residency at ZK/U, and perhaps points towards future directions of the Plan Bienen project. You can read a text version in the upcoming un Magazine 9.1, due for publication in June 2015.
A big thank you to the AAF research collective, who for the last year or so have been “discussing, experimenting and theorising at the frontiers of aesthetic theory. Taking the critical tradition of aesthetics to be no longer adequate to the possibilities of knowledge and experience of the twenty-first century, we have begun to develop an experimental practico-aesthetics that is less oriented towards the success or impact of work that defers to the judgement of a (human) receiver, than towards an aesthetics that is productive of realities, experience, and new declensions of ‘art’. This alternative is generational, not analytical; interventionist rather than evaluative.”
[Script for parting performance presented by Sumugan Sivanesan at ZK/U, 25 September 2014]
Hello and welcome to our Openhaus. All of us at ZK/U have been busily anticipating this evening’s schedule, and I would like to begin the tour by drawing your attention to those that might have been the busiest of us all, but have now retired for the evening—the Moabees. Over the summer there has been some buzz around die Bienen in the city and the extent to which Bienenvolke are appearing in each and every kiez. It seems that reports of scores of dead and disappearing bees over the last few years have revived our interest in these long-time cultural companions, calling attention to the ways in which we all profit from their presence.
The phrase ‘robbing the bees’ is often used to describe the task of collecting honey from beehives. Honey may well be sought after as a ‘nectar of the gods’, but is in the first instance food made by and for bees from the nectar they collect from flowers. Recently, Tessa and I were talking to a beekeeper who described the honey she had extracted as ‘a gift from the bees’. This Imkerin said that the bees permitted her to take their honey as long as she agreed to pass it on. She gives jars of honey to friends and relatives, and to tradespeople as a reward for a job well done. Such gifts spotlight the interplay of goodwill and obligations that bind us to one another and are in excess of more rational economic relations.
Humans have harvested honey and cultivated bees since the earliest recorded civilisations, however for many of today’s beekeepers honey is simply a ‘sweet bonus’, a byproduct of the crucial pollination services that these and other insects provide. In the current eco-cultural climate bees are often portrayed as a benevolent species—‘the good bee’ brings the world into abundance and maintains the conditions on this planet in which we thrive. If we believe that by improving the lives of bees we also improve our own, then what kind of lifeworlds would emerge if we pegged our progress to bees?
Berlin has a reputation as a bee capital. In the past, the city’s beekeepers lobbied for the planting of certain trees that would provide food for bees… their success can be read in street names such as Unter den Linden, Birkenstrasse and Kastanienallee. More recently installing hives atop significant buildings such as the Abgeordnetenhaus, the Berlin Opera and of course right here at ZK/U, not only locates bees in the heart of the city but brings them into our social consciousness. Today European beekeepers have been instrumental in having particular insecticides, known as neonicotinoids, banned in the EU, reducing the mortality rates of bees and wilfully keeping the prospect of a world without bees at bay… as one local beekeeper puts it, ‘intervening politically on behalf of the bees’.
Honeybees are social beings capable of collective decision-making and action. They are creatures of extraordinary strength and endurance that give their lives for the hive and are often used to symbolise patriotism and hard work. The sociability of bees has been read as a metaphor for both social collectivism and capitalist industrialism, as well as to argue for and against the value of individualism. Our fascination with bees has inspired the sciences, arts and philosophy, so might a bee-led social turn, in turn shape our wellbeing?
Whilst it is unlikely that if all the bees of the world suddenly died, we would soon follow, such a scenario would spell catastrophe for both our habitats and industries. Little is known about the effects of bees on the systems that support arable land, but we can be sure that yields of, say, almonds in California or coffee in Costa Rica would collapse overnight. As the once well-stocked shelves in our food halles and supermarkets began to empty out, would ideas that we associate with bees, such as social cohesion and cooperation, also disappear? As a consequence, imagine if organised and once industrious workers arose as a swarm of vengeful killers!
A principle of classical economics known as Jean-Baptist Say’s law states that ‘supply creates its own demand.’ According to this logic, supply precedes demand and seeds desire. Now into my last week at ZK/U, and with Tessa already back in Sydney, I find myself with an over supply of raw local honey—more than I could possibly consume before I too must leave. As a parting gesture and in the spirit of ebullience and abundance Tessa and I would like to pass this bounty on to you. Consider it a gift; from ourselves and the beekeepers, and by extension a gift from the bees.
[Cue music]
Video: Faraz Anoushahpour
You are cordially invited to the Unofficial Opening of the Plan Bienen Mint.
After 3 months researching real and possible relationships between people, bees, honey and time in Berlin, our time is (almost) up. We have over the summer accumulated quite a number of very local honeys, and we would rather share them with you than try our luck with Australian customs.
See what trades have been taking place between beekeepers and honey-eaters, with a special private viewing of the commemorative Notgeld soon to be minted for each exchange.
For anyone in Berlin this weekend, tomorrow at ZK/U is the very first ‘Gütermarkt‘ – a different kind of local market.
We will be there all day with the Plan Bienen – ‘Honey Stock Exchange’. Bring something special, home-made or home-grown for your chance to take home honey produced by the bees right here at ZK/U. High-frequency trades welcome, all reasonable offers considered.
Gütermarkt
Sunday 7 September
12-7pm
ZK/U – Siemensstr 27, Berlin
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‘Killer Bee’ movies emerged as a popular strain of ‘creature feature’ films in the Cold War era of the 1960s. Films such as The Deadly Bees (1966), Genocide (1968) and The Swarm (1978) established a genre based around formulaic ‘nature’s revenge’ plot lines in which insects, often mutated in scientific experiments, escape from laboratories to attack and kill human protagonists. In The Bees (1978) swarms of mutant bees bring down military aircraft, target politicians and deliver an ecologically-driven ultimatum to the United Nations via a human interpreter. Such fantastic narratives can be read as popular cautionary tales about the modern sciences empowering humans to ‘play god’, underpinned by a Cold War fear of biological warfare and the scientific supremacy of ideological rivals. Curiously these films attribute direct agency and political action to swarms of angry, organised non-human actors, entertaining the prospect of non-human rights.
The phenomenon of disappearing bees synonymous with Colony Collapse Disorder has compelled lobby groups such as Mellifera e.V. in Germany to interfere on behalf of this ‘subaltern species’ in human affairs, resulting in a temporary ban on the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the EU, which is soon take effect in the US as well. In his book The Politics of Nature (2004), Bruno Latour details his vision for a collective yet-to-come of human and non-human agents that would supersede the society/nature divide upon which modern institutions are founded.
Might this most recent phase of human-bee relations provide an entry point to consider how such ‘multinatural’ political associations are actually taking shape? Furthermore, is it only in fiction that a species capable of collective decision-making and with which human cultures share a long history–and also food–could have ‘thought’ to take actions in order to change our behaviour?
To call ourselves geological agents is to attribute to us a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History: Four Theses, 2009.
Dipesh Chakrabarty begins his essay The Climate of History: Four Theses (2009) by asking his readers to imagine ‘a future without us’, raising the prospect of human finitude as a potential (and some would say inevitable) catastrophe that appeals to a notion of human universals. The historian argues that scientific consensus regarding human induced climate change has facilitated a significant shift in our systems of knowledge. Humans who have evolved to cause significant changes in the Earth’s atmosphere, environment and ecological systems have become geological actors over recent periods of expansion and industrialisation, as put forward in the Anthropocene thesis. In doing so humans have instigated a series of ecological reactions that may potentially render the planet inhospitable for their continued advancement (and thereby suggesting the limits of capitalism). Chakrabarty lists recent droughts, cyclones, brush fires, crop failures, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, the increasing acidity of seas and damage to the food chain as some of the consequences of recent human activities and innovations. In light of such developments, Chakrabarty urges his readers to reconsider the discipline of human history, which over the course of its development occurred apart from natural history, to recognise human agency in changing the most basic physical properties of its host planet. At a public lecture delivered at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, June 2014, the influential scholar pressed for another kind of historical thinking in which nature might act as a co-author.
In her contribution to the Reaktion Books animal series, Bee (2006), Claire Preston refers to pictorial records depicting the cultivation of bees to claim that apiculture originated with the ancient Egyptians as early as 2500 BC. She continues to discuss other pre-common era records of bee cultivation and honey hunting across Europe and India, describing a significant and even symbiotic co-existence between humans and bees through the ages. Indeed bees and other pollinator species are essential to the human food chain. More than one-third of the world’s crop species, such as alfalfa, sunflower and numerous fruits and vegetables, depend on bee pollination. Furthermore, scientists estimate that animal mediated pollination is required for the reproduction of nearly 70% of the world’s flowering plants, including between 60% and 90% of wild plants.
In recent years the mass disappearance and death of worker bees from managed hives, a syndrome known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), has raised awareness of the roles and challenges faced by bee populations in the industrialised world. Scientists have not been able to narrow down a single cause of CCD, rather attributing the sudden death of bee populations to multiple and interactive conditions. These include the prolonged use of insecticides and in particular neonicotinoids; new parasites and pathogens such as Varroa mite and Nosema; environmental stresses including a lack of biodiversity in monocultural farming environments; and effects of climate change such as season creep. The phenomena of CCD and the lack of accurate data about global bee populations and other pollinator species may have inspired a renewed interest in urban beekeeping and community innovations such as Open Source Beehives. Bee lobby groups, such as Mellifera e.V. in Germany, that ‘interfere’ politically on behalf of bees, have been successful in having a temporary ban placed on the use of neonicotinoids in the EU, although not yet in the US where CCD has had a greater impact.
If we posit bee colony mortality against the expansion of human populations and their geological effects, does the prospect of the extinction of the former species necessarily spell catastrophe for the latter? The artist Ally Bisshop suggests that precarious bee populations are allegorical of human finitude as both species are effectively subservient to the sun. If pitched as a contest between populations of human, bee and other heliocentric species with regards to their ability to inhabit, extract resources and manipulate their environment, Chakrabarty reminds us that the eventual decline of the human species that can be glimpsed in the death of bee populations is not ‘a crisis for the inorganic planet’ and would not spell disaster for the Earth and its most prolific matter.
What are the implications of Chakrabarty’s call for another mode of history, in which nature might be a co-author, for our own practice that concerns social relations and exchange? How are such interspecies relations translated as politics and what is the potential for non-human agency in the expanded notion of culture that Chakrabarty suggests?
References
Bisshop, Ally, 2014. ‘The Bees Will Tell Us’ (draft copy). Also available in Bisshop, Ally and Messih, Gemma, 2014. Eventually the Sun will Consume the Earth.
Preston, Claire, 2006. Bee. Reaktion Books, London 2006.
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The artists invite you to be part of an experimental exchange network in which self-produced honey is traded for various non-monetary things (time, skills, help etc.). Open to beekeepers and honey-eaters alike. No obligations!
You can also join by loaning a domestic object related to bees or honey – this could be anything…. All borrowed items will be displayed together in a window installation in Moabit, after which they will be returned to their homes.
For questions or more info , contact us at: planbienen@gmail.com / 015 252 806 821
Here at ZK/U we have our own little colony of bees to observe, maintained by the Moabienen Mitimkern, a team of busy young beekeepers who are bringing a number of beehives and bee-related activities to the neighbourhood of Moabit, one of Berlin’s oldest and sleepier parts. There are four hives perched on top of a container out the front, including the especially calm ‘Vanilla Ice’, and ‘Rosalee’, a consolatory gift from another beekeeper who stole one of the Moabienen’s colonies whilst it was swarming (an antiquated German law entitling whoever captures a swarm to keep it..).
Yesterday we joined Elisa and Katja as they checked up on the hives and prepared a new colony for Jana, who will install them in her local Friedhof. Though the decidedly unsummery weather meant we couldn’t harvest any honey, the bees seemed happy enough.
During the week we met Anna, a beekeeper at Prinzessinnengarten, who wondered what it would be like to be a bee for a day. Karl von Frisch discovered that bees possess a ‘language’ through a series of experiments he began in the 1920s. Now scientists following in his wake are attempting to communicate with bees using robots that will ‘live’ amongst bees and with a view to influence their decision making processes and behaviour. Such propositions bring to my mind China Miéville’s science fiction Embassytown, in which humans co-habiting a planet with large insectoid hosts shift the parameters of language across both species—the story’s protagonist is a simile that functions as part of an alien language without the faculty to lie.
The RoboBee Project headed by Raul Rojas at the Freie University Berlin have developed a honeybee robot that can do a basic waggle dance. As can be seen in the segment below, these dancing bots could potentially be used to tell real bees to fly to specific locations.
Project ASSIS|bf coordinated by Dr. Thomas Schmickl of the Artificial Life Lab at the University of Graz are developing robots that will be able to communicate, adapt and evolve to ‘live’ amongst populations of bees and fish. By focusing on ‘swarm intelligence’ the project proposes to pioneer methods by which humans can interfere in animal societies in order to manage the environment. Schmickl lists various benefits of doing so, ranging from pest control to agriculture, but also considers contemporary human, social media affected society to be a social cyborg in itself. Thus, he reasons, model systems in the lab for studying mixed-societies of robots, algorithms and social organisms are crucial to understanding our own human society.
Thomas Seeley’s Honeybee Democracy recounts the the biologist’s lifelong study of honeybees. Seeley, writing in a very personable style, describes how he came to understand the hive as a collective intelligence, and the bee swarms as ‘a kind of exposed brain that hangs quietly from a tree branch’. In a blog post for the Harvard Business Review he offers what we might learn from bees’ collective decision making:
1. Remind the group’s members of their shared interests and foster mutual respect, so they work together productively. The scout bees know instinctually that their interests are aligned toward choosing the optimal home site, so they work together as a team. There are no clashing curmudgeons in a bee swarm.
2. Explore diverse solutions to the problem, to maximize the group’s likelihood of uncovering an excellent option. The scout bees search far and wide to discover a broad assortment of possible living quarters.
3. Aggregate the group’s knowledge through a frank debate. Use the power of a fair and open competition to distinguish good options from bad ones. The scout bees rely on a turbulent debate among groups supporting different options to identify a winner. Whichever group first attracts sufficient supporters wins the debate.
4. Minimize the leader’s influence on the group’s thinking. By functioning as an impartial moderator rather than a proselytizing boss, a leader enables his group to use its combined knowledge and brainpower. The scout bees have no dominating leader and so can take a broad and deep look at their options.
5. Balance interdependence (information sharing) and independence (absence of peer pressure) among the group’s members. Only if ideas are shared publicly but evaluated privately will the group be good at exploring its options and making good choices. Scout bees share freely the news of their finds, but each one makes her own, independent decision of whether or not to support a site.
Illustrator, author and beekeeper, M.E.A. McNeil’s summary of the book can be read here and here. Tom Seeley’s 2011 lecture at Cornell University is below.