Artist Ava Roth Collaborates With Bees to Create Honeycomb Art

We've known for a number of years already that bee populations around the world are in peril, due to a number of factors including human-caused habitat destruction and the overuse of pesticides. But it seems that more and more people are heeding the call to save the bees, whether it's learning about beekeeping either online or from books, building optimized beehives, or even making experimental music with bees.

Artists like Ava Roth are also raising awareness about bees by creating art in collaboration with honeybees. Based out of Toronto, Canada, Roth likes to use a variety of materials found in nature—leaves, twigs, tree bark, and porcupine quills—in combination with bee-made honeycomb structures to create one-of-a-kind collages.

As Roth explained to us, she is a traditionally trained artist who eventually became more interested in bees in 2017 due to her previous work with encaustic or hot wax painting:

"My professional interest in bees began with my discovery of encaustic as an artistic medium. So while I have always been an environmentalist, I came to discover the importance of bees through the lens of an artist. As I began relying on beeswax for my work, I became increasingly interested in bees themselves, and quickly learned about Colony Collapse Disorder. Soon, my artistic expression became completely intertwined with my chosen medium and with the ecological implications of these materials. My Honeybee Collaboration series, in which organic collages are placed inside hives for bees to encase in comb, is wholly informed by my knowledge, respect, and concern for bees. The collection celebrates the extraordinary work of the honeybee, and completes their extraordinary comb with handmade creations that evoke a similar intricacy and delicacy. My intention is to offer a sense of hopefulness at a time when most people are overwhelmed with despair at the state of the climate, and our role in its destruction."

As Roth likes to say, her bee-related projects are a form of "inter-species collaboration with local honeybees."

Many of these bee-focused art pieces begin with Roth first gathering materials in nature, like fallen horsehairs, small twigs, colorful leaves, and interesting bits of tree bark.

Roth will then combine these materials with thread and beads in her studio, carefully creating encaustic collages that are suspended in embroidery hoops of different sizes.

These hooped encaustic collages are then attached to custom-made Langstroth hive frames and then placed inside honeybee hives where thousands of bees embed the human-made artwork with their honeycomb.

In these simple but fascinating works that synthesize human and honeybee outputs, Roth plays with the orientation of components, color and line arrangements, to create striking compositions that contrast the orderliness of the human-made elements versus the organic unpredictability in the honeycomb made by the bees.

In other works, Roth will create compositions that echo the agency of the bees, rather than something that contrasts with it.

Besides pushing the boundaries of where the human-made environment meets that of nature, Roth tells Treehugger that working with bees in this way has meant a new way of harmonizing with nature:

"The honeybee collection is collaborative in the truest sense. It is not just a top-down directive from me to the bees. Working on their time, in their cycles, and with their particular needs in mind, I have learned what materials the bees respond to, how long to keep pieces in the hive before honey or brood is deposited, how to anticipate the color or depth of the comb, and most challenging of all, negotiating with them over which areas will and will not have comb. At this point, both my process and my materials are almost entirely organic, and I strive to leave as delicate an 'artificial' touch as possible on my work."

As this new partnership continues to evolve, Roth is working creatively in tune with her local bees, aiming to raise awareness of the bees in her own way, while presenting a new, nature-centered approach to traditional art. She points out that her work hopes to reveal a new relationship between bees and humans:

"Making beautiful things is a way for me to experience the world itself as beautiful, and to keep me connected to a sense of awe and wonder on a day-to-day basis. That said, I have come to understand that all of my work is essentially an exploration of the particular place where humans collide with their natural environment. My work consciously attempts to suggest a more beautiful outcome of this encounter."

To see more, visit Ava Roth and on Instagram.