Bee is for Biodiversity
003 August 2024
What is it?
Biodiversity is a term that refers to the variety of all life on Earth, big and small, and their intricate relationships that, together, keep them alive and thriving. Biodiversity changes over time as species evolve, how they interact within their changing environments, and even the cultural connections humans have with different species can affect biodiversity. However, in the past couple centuries, as industrialism has led to rapid changes in human’s day-to-day lives, it has damaged ecosystems and led to a massive decline in Earth's biodiversity.
If you plan on surviving off of corn syrups, soybeans, and rice, then you can stop reading right here (those products and crops usually either self-pollinate or get pollination help from the wind), but if you enjoy having fruits, vegetables, and nuts then you have benefited from bee labor!
Pollination is an essential process that allows plants to reproduce. The process can be accomplished by many animals such as birds, insects, and bats, but bees are one of the most well known and most efficient pollinators, both in agriculture and natural ecosystems. Bees are vital for food security, (over a third of the world’s food supply relies on bees!) yet bee populations continue to decline due to the rampant use of pesticides and other harsh environmental factors, like climate change.
The disappearance of bees, or even a substantial drop in their population, would make foods including apples, avocados, onions, almonds, and coffee beans scarce.
Heather Beardsley: Tell the Bees (2024)
American visual artist, Heather Beardsley works across a range of mediums, including textiles, embroidery, image transfer, sculpture, and video to create projects that are, according to her website, “at the intersection of art, science, and environmental issues.” Through a series of international residencies, travel has become an important aspect of Beardsley’s art; she incorporates elements from cities she’s visited and is more familiar with into her projects. In her current solo exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, “Tell The Bees” she focuses in on her home state, alarmed at the absence of biodiversity and native pollinators in the region, her art wonders “What might the NOVA (Northern Virginia) area look like if urban planners had been more thoughtful and embraced biodiversity during development?”
The title “Tell The Bees” is seemingly a reference to European tradition and Celtic mythology where beekeeping families would inform the bees about significant life changes, including deaths, births, and marriages. While beekeepers from the 1800s may not have had the science and statistics we have today, they understood how important the bees were to their crops and food supply. The act of “telling the bees” was a way to further emphasize the deep and important connection between humans and their bees. It was said that if bees were not told of the beekeeping family’s major life moments that this may lead to reduced honey production, bees leaving the hive, or even bees dying. Newlyweds who failed to introduce themselves to the colony (on top of giving the bees major FOMO) were apparently destined for unhappiness.
This exhibit includes information about threats to native bee populations, the importance of their protection, tips for making your own backyard more bee-friendly, many multimedia works or art and three bee hotels sculpted from local materials. These bee hotels, providing nesting materials, are sanctuaries for native pollinators and will be up until the end of the exhibition this September. The centerpiece for the exhibition is Conversations with Bees, an interactive sculpture. Here, the artist invites visitors to deliver messages through a hidden microphone to a nearby bee haven on the museum grounds. Virginia MOCA explains that “This dialogue is a recognition of our profound interconnectedness with the natural world.”
Find more of Beardsley’s work featured on the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art’s website and on heatherbeardsley.com.
How2Help
The good news is we have the power to change things for the better. By understanding threats to biodiversity and their real-world impacts, we can tackle conservation challenges with the knowledge we need to succeed.
Read up and take action. Learn what positive actions you can help local schools and public spaces in your area practice to promote pollinator friendly land and biodiversity. Make your own backyard more biodiverse! Here is a link to a PDF compiled by the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign on Pollinator Friendly Practices and here is another from Dogwood Alliance on How To Increase Biodiversity in Your Backyard and Garden.
Donate. Your time or money would be greatly appreciated by many environmental organizations fighting to improve biodiversity and pollinator health while providing accessible education covering those topics.
Pollinator Partnership’s mission is to promote the health of pollinators, critical to food and ecosystems, through conservation, education, and research.
HoneyLove is a Los Angeles based non-profit conservation organization with a mission to protect the honeybees by educating communities and inspiring new urban beekeepers.
With 7 chapters (Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont), the Northeast Organic Farming Association advocates for and educates on organic and sustainable agriculture, family-scale farming and homesteading in rural, suburban and urban areas, agricultural justice and other related policy issues. They offer technical support and educational programming. Their efforts have made lasting impacts throughout the entire food system with a 50+ year history of advocating for organic farming, local food systems, and ecological restoration.
Talk to Others and Create Art. Below are some resources to learn more about a bee’s role in biodiversity, this should set you up with a great base to engage in conversations with others about protecting nature. In addition to learning more, another powerful tool for sparking conversations is creating art. Art allows artists to express complex issues in creative and thought-provoking ways and environmentalism covers a vast range of complicated issues. What visuals represent biodiversity to you? How can a work of art challenge viewers' assumptions about nature or offer a glimpse of a future shaped by climate change? Or similar to Heather Beardsley’s exhibition, what might your neighborhood look like if nature was given more room to thrive?
Love2Learn?
Would you love to learn more? Need recommendations on where to start? Here’s what to watch. Check out the following resources for more in-depth and easily digestible information on bee’s role in biodiversity.
Honey, We Saved The Bees (2024), Vox’s Today, Explained Podcast - Millions of bees died because of colony collapse disorder over the past few decades, but America’s honeybee population has now rocketed to an all-time high. The Washington Post's Andrew Van Dam explains how.
The Pollinators (2019) Documentary - A cinematic journey around the United States following migratory beekeepers and their truckloads of honey bees as they pollinate the flowers that become the fruits, nuts and vegetables we all eat.
Maggie for Short :)
Welcome to Aeverywhere! After months of planning, I’m glad to be back. Aeverywhere began as a magazine for my senior design project in college, but with some time off, my first international travels, moving states to my first apartment, and starting my first post-college job, I felt Aeverywhere was ready for a comeback (but with a little make-over first).
After looking through gallery websites and Instagram accounts, visiting museums and LinkedIn pages, I am so glad I found Heather Beardsley. Her work perfectly embodies many of the goals I hope to accomplish and aligns with many messages I hope to spread through Aeverywhere’s Newsletters. Beardsley’s creativity, and her art’s emotional resonance, takes steps to bridge the gap between the unfortunate facts and scientific data showing us the loss of biodiversity and pollinator health. She takes an idea: how humans have dominated much of America (filling it with concrete) without considering the effects it might have on other species (but also how it might come back around to bite us in the butt, affecting our own food supply) and images a different timeline. It’s inspiring (and unfortunately rare) to see others caring about the little things (like bees) that make major impacts on our lives. She is making scary environmental issues more relatable and the entrance to environmentalism more accessible. I especially love how along with this exhibition, she held an all-ages workshop at Virginia’s Museum of Contemporary Arts in Arlington, where (unfortunately I missed the workshop, but I assume) she was able to connect with museum-goers face-to-face, answering questions, and helping locals envision a more biodiverse area.
