BEE ROUND DANCE

Honeybees communicate through movement—and distinguish visual forms in ways different from our own.

The silk edition brings together diagrams drawn from Karl von Frisch’s studies of bee communication and visual perception. At its centre, the circular path traces the round dance, performed inside the hive to signal that a source of food is nearby. Around it appear forms used in experiments on bee vision.

These visual languages emerge from Telling the Bees, an ongoing artwork exploring bee communication, collective orientation and interspecies forms of knowledge and care. Within the work, dance becomes an embodied map in the Beeseeker’s search for the last wild bee swarm. Translated onto silk, a diagram of movement returns to a moving body.