https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6P-jfnJy28Ra242MEVXbTNPTGc/view?usp=sharing

My Artistic Perception of the Beehive:

During this quarter I have asked myself many things. One of the oddest things I have asked myself is “How can I 3D-Print a beehive in the shape of something that changes the perception of bees altogether when looked at?” I believe, that in order to raise awareness of the major decline in bee populous thorughout the world, it is key that we should first portray or introduce the importance of bees in our everyday lives. In these two images, the top image is a beehive that was naturally constructed, and the bottom image is a beehive that was created for the production and harvest of honeycombs. There is two major differences in these beehives. The bottom one is also made of styrofoam.

Natural Beehives. Digital image. Gophoto.us. Gophoto, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Natural Beehives. Digital image. Gophoto.us. Gophoto, n.d. Web. 17 Nov. 2014.

Implementation in The Evergreen State College:

On the campus of The Evergreen State College, you will find two beehives that were man-made. I would like to go into further detail on how these beehives are used, but I have no knowledge on how people use them. These beehives are interesting since they wee made mostly out of recycled objects and cardboard.

My Tinkered Creation:

My tinkered creation is still in the process of being tinkered with, and so far I only have a little bit done. This is okay because I will be furthering my design with Adobe Illustrator in the very near future. My design I have ready, which is the beehive in the shape of a fetus which resembles the intricate structure that a beehive is, and also the care that we must provide to nurse them back into healthy population again.

Anthony Stallsworth

Sarah Williams and Arlen Speights

Making Meaning Matter

3 November 2014

Blue Rabbit Iteration #2

As all great or amazing things invented in this world, they all start off with just an idea. Whether this is a good idea or not, we do not always know. I question what creates a good idea, is it the complexity of deep thought that was put into an idea, the intentional motivations behind it, or is it simply how great the use of the idea plays a role in people’s lives? I believe that these roles play a key part in the machine that is “idea-making.” Sometimes the idea we come up with are already invented. As for my idea, I am copying something that nature has created many times over and over again: The beehive. My intentions are not to innovate the beehive, or make it better by any means, but only to recreate the beehive to help people think about the environment they live in, in a new way. This is the intentional motivation behind my idea.

I would only like to create this beehive in a way that it may be able to possibly sustain a hive of inhabitants that may so choose to move into it, but also resemble the shape of something meaningful so that I can innovate the way people think. As of now, I am not sure entirely what that shape will be, because there are many different meaningful shapes I could choose. Shape ideas could range from the shape of the world with all of its continents plateau’d into it, to the less complex shape of just a heart. Even though both of these shapes symbolize the relationship between honeybees and their care for the world and the nature in it, there are still many options to choose from. Another idea to consider in the creation of my project is the filament that I choose to print it out with. PLA is your standard, biodegrade-able filament that you can use if you want the Earth to inherit more plastic. I do not wish to do this, so I want to use a more natural filament to create my beehive, one that is created from recycled wood. This filament is called “Laywoo-D3.” Although this filament is not as good as the beeswax filament, we do not have the extruder needed in order to print beeswax.

Although parasites and harsh weather environments are not the only enemies of the life pertaining to a bee, they are still part of the number of the natural elements that can kill them. By natural elements, I mean ways humans have not destructed their lives by force of the honey production businesses in today’s modern era. “Honey-bees inadvertently come into contact with a wide array of inorganic and organic pollutants, and these are often taken back to the colony.” (Devillers, Preface) As seen in texts written by those who study bees because of their role in the agricultural aspect of the world, they are affected by the way us humans are affecting the environment that they are living in. To show the importance that Genus Apis (honey bees) play in our agriculture, there have been many studies done, and I would like to portray them to you. The U.S Department of Agriculture wrote an article stating that “the bumblebee is regarded as one of the most efficient pollinators of many crops.” They wrote this article in response to the decline in population of honeybees in 1976, and since then, the bee population in the United States has only gone downhill.

“The first human-constructed hives were variations on the theme of the hollow tree.” (Jacobson 25-26) The earliest known man-made beehives were found in Israel, which dates back to around the year of 900 B.C. This is a very early time in human history that honeybees even became important. In the tombs of Egypt, archaeologists discovered honey buried with the important figures of that time, which means it held either a medicinal value, a spiritual value, or high standard-value to their culture (That is to say it was worth a couple dollars). May I also add the fun fact that when they found this honey, even after thousands of years, it was still edible because honey never goes bad. Honey is also a form of antiseptic. One that is considered a  “slow-release antiseptic, one that does not damage tissue as other antiseptics sometimes can.” (Buchmann 120)

There has been many ways that honey is used throughout the world. The most important part of this use is the creation of it. To create it, bees must first find the pollen from flowers to create it. During this time is when they pollinate flowers and keep the flowers alive, because most flowers would not survive without the bees there to pollinate them. “Without honeybees, you would be limited to eating oats, rice, and corn.” (Markle 6) Although some of us would live happy eating just oats, rice, and corn, many people would probably not be so happy doing that. We have many vegetables and fruits that we need to eat to have our daily intake of nutrients in order for us to stay healthy. Without this, the world and the people in it would look much different, and we would have to change the technologies we use just to be able to survive.

Although all of these facts and textual support relate to my project, my project is not made with the intention to save the bees. Again, my project has only one soul purpose of just helping innovate the way people think about honeybees. My goal is to change people’s minds next time they decide to step on one when they see it collection pollen from a flower, because even one honeybee lost can create a big difference to its hive. I think think that the goal of everyone’s projects is to make people think in a different way, or to gain some knowledge behind the meaning of our project. Although we may not be able to change the world, we may be able to change the way people look at certain aspects of it, if not a certain aspect of the world entirely. And who knows, maybe we can even change the way people live on the world as well.

Works Cited

Buchmann, Stephen L. Honey Bees: Letters from the Hive. New York:

Delacorte, 2010. Print.

Devillers, James, and Minh-Hà Pham-Delègue. Honey Bees: Estimating the

          Environmental Impact of Chemicals. London: Taylor & Francis, 2002.

Jacobsen, Rowan. Fruitless Fall: The Collapse of the Honey Bee and the

Coming Agricultural Crisis. New York: Bloomsbury, 2008. Print.

Markle, Sandra. The Case of the Vanishing Honey Bees: A Scientific

Mystery. Minneapolis: Millbook, 2014. Print.

“Pollination and the Honey Bee.” (1976): 1-20. Web. 3 Nov. 2014.

<http://books.google.com/books?

id=gWwvAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA17&dq=honeybees+agriculture&hl=en&sa=

X&ei=eiZYVMv7KYLtoASUpYGQAQ&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&

q=honeybees%20agriculture&f=false>.

Anthony Stallsworth

Professors Arlen Speights and Sarah Williams

Making Meaning Matter

20 October 2014

Blue Rabbit Iteration 1

The population of honeybees has been going down drastically, which is also known as the “Colony Collapse Disorder” to most researchers. This is a major crisis for nature, and the food we need to live. Bees pollinate ninety percent of our food’s nutrition, and without honeybees we would be at a major decline in food, making it very hard to sustain a healthy daily diet. I believe that the printing of beehives to help sustain the bee population is something worth making in the world. This is why I have chosen printing a beehive that may be able to sustain and house honeybees for my Blue Rabbit Project.

I would like to back up my idea with more statistics on the importance of beehives, not just in the United States, but in the rest of the world as well. “Each year more than a million commercially produced bumblebee colonies are sold around the world.” (Paul H. Williams) These beehives produce more than ten billion dollars annually through their pollination service alone. The beehive industry is a fairly large one, and it is only getting larger with people already 3D printing these beehives. Lulzbot is a 3D Printer-manufacturing business with a blog about people who “design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way, to monitor and track the health and behavior of a colony as it develops.” (https://www.lulzbot.com/blog/3d-printing-open-source-beehives)

The structure of a beehive is a repeated octagonal pattern. Basically, this is a pattern where each line intersects each-other at a one-hundred and twenty degree angle This pattern is not that hard to print, especially since the 3D Printers already print anything out in an octagonal pattern. I believe that printing out a plastic beehive is not very safe to the environment, because after time it enters our oceans and kills a lot of the animals that hunt in the ocean or live in the ocean. Most man-mad beehives are created out of wood and wire mesh, which creates the octagonal pattern. Plastic is harmful to the environment which is why I would like to create my beehive out of a different material. I considered beeswax, which would be a great substitute filament, because it would be easy for the bees to find and move into, and also it is a natural material that would not hurt the environment in any way. Although there is a type of extruder you can install on your 3D printer to print with beeswax, our school does not have one. This is the only thing stopping me from going through with it. There is a filament called “Laywoo-D3”, which is created out of recycled wood and harmless binding polymers. This type of filament would be immensely better for printing than the more common PLA filament, because it is not made mostly out of plastic.

In New Zealand, a golden honeycomb was created and placed in Sir Edward Hillary’s backyard “whereupon his bees adopted it as their own.” (Jacob E. Nyenhuis 140) This is only one example of bees moving into a man-made honeycomb, and I am sure that there are many more examples. Since the total number of managed honeybee colonies has receded 2.5 million in the last 40 years, it is very important that we create more, to keep the honeybee population sustained. By creating more honeybee colonies we can maintain the honeybee population, if not increase it, and in turn that will keep our plants pollinated to keep making the food we need. We cannot produce most of the food we have on this earth by ourselves alone. If we lost all of the bees in the world, we would start declining in populations ourselves. As humans it is our job to help the other species that live on this planet, especially the ones we need. Because there is already so much stuff on this Earth, I find it alright to create something that matters to the Earth, and is not just some useless plastic object that people will eventually throw out. I believe that studying beehives for a quarter is useful because bees are such a necessity to humans, and also flowers. If we 3D Printed beehives, bees would have more availability to colonies and this would help sustain their population. Most bees die in the winter because it is cold and because most of the flowers go away during this time of the year. While supplying more beehives to bee farms, we could keep them alive during the winter. This is why I think beehives are an important and useful object to create in the world.

Works Cited

“3D Printing Open Source Beehives.” Web log post. Lulzbot. Aleph Objects Inc, n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.

Kaplan, Kim. “Related Topics.” ARS : Honey Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. United States Department of Agriculture, n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2014.

Nyenhuis, Jacob E. Myth and the Creative Process: Michael Ayrton and the Myth of Daedalus, the Maze Maker. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. Print.

Williams, Paul. Bumble Bees of North America an Identification Guide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2014. Print.