Safe Space | Franz Ehmann’s collaboration with bees.

Franz Ehmann is a featured artist in NERAM’s current exhibition Safe Space. Ehmann is an Austrian/Australian artist, a chef and a beekeeper, who lives and works in Brisbane, Queensland. Ehmann works predominately with installation, sculpture and performance, while his works are based on food production, materials related to cooking, consumption and waste.

Franz Ehmann’s series, collectively titled Fourteen Days, was made in a unique partnership between the artist and his backyard bees. Ehmann folded men’s cotton business shirts into neat rectangles and coated and stiffened them with wax before inserting them in place of the frames in the honey box of his beehive. When he drew them out after a fortnight, the insects had built up wax cell structures all over the cloth, encrusting their surfaces with a delicate, geometrically-precise three-dimensional hexagonal honeycomb design. Through the ornamental coating, you can still recognise the outlines of the original garments. Fittingly they are displayed in the gallery with a flat frontality like traditional bas-relief sculptures which, in some strange sense, they are. The beehive is a safe space that is defended determinedly by the bees. They emit pheromones to warn one another of attacks, and also sting intruders. The artist nonetheless succeeds in invading their territory. The social arrangement of a bee population is called a colony and Ehmann’s artistic approach is to perform, ever-so-subtly, a colonising act on the bees; intruding into and occupying their space so as to exploit their labour in the making of his art. The bees’ secretions that smother the shirts may appear as a type of defensive mechanism to contain and neutralise an invasive threat.

Christine Toussainte Morrow, Safe Space Exhibition Curator

https://www.safespacesculpture.com/artists/franz-ehmann

With the help of the University of New England’s honey bee expert and beekeeper, Caroline Sonter we have put together some fun facts and resources on the wonderful world of the honey bee.

Fun facts about bees sourced from National Geographic Kids

1. Honey bees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits and vegetables. This means that they help other plants grow! Bees transfer pollen between the male and female parts, allowing plants to grow seeds and fruit.

2. Honey bees live in hives (or colonies). The members of the hive are divided into three types:

• Queen: One queen runs the whole hive. Her job is to lay the eggs that will spawn the hive’s next generation of bees. The queen also produces chemicals that guide the behaviour of the other bees.
• Workers: these are all female and their roles are to forage for food (pollen and nectar from flowers), build and protect the hive, clean and circulate air by beating their wings. Workers are the only bees most people ever see flying around outside the hive.
• Drones: These are the male bees, and their purpose is to mate with the new queen. Several hundred live in each hive during the spring and summer. But come winter, when the hive goes into survival mode, the drones are kicked out

3.  What are these buzzing bugs most famous for? Delicious honey! But did you know they produce honey as food stores for the hive during winter? Luckily for us, these efficient little workers produce 2-3 time more honey than they need, so we get to enjoy the tasty treat, too!

4. If the queen bee dies, workers will create a new queen by selecting a young larva (the newly hatched baby insects) and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly“. This enables the larva to develop into a fertile queen.

5. Honey bees are fab flyers. They fly at a speed of around 25km per hour and beat their wings 200 times per second!

6. Each bee has 170 odorant receptors, which means they have one serious sense of smell! They use this to communicate within the hive and to recognise different types of flowers when looking for food.

7. The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey.

8. The queen can live up to five years. She is busiest in the summer months, when she can lay up to 2,500 eggs a day!

9. Honey bees are also brilliant boogiers! To share information about the best food sources, they perform their ‘waggle dance’. When the worker returns to the hive, it moves in a figure-of-eight and waggles its body to indicate the direction of the food source. Cool, huh?

10. Sadly, over the past 15 years, colonies of bees have been disappearing, and the reason remains unknown. Referred to as ‘colony collapse disorder’, billions of honey bees across the world are leaving their hives, never to return. In some regions, up to 90% of bees have disappeared!

Get ‘beezy’ with our fun activities below!

Can you do the waggle dance? At home, with your siblings or in class visit this website to waggle like a bee!

WAGGLE DANCE ACTIVITY >>

SEE like a bee!

Together with local artist and volunteer, Alex Riske we created a downloadable activity for familes and students to see like a bee! Ideal for early stage 1 – 3. See the steps below…

Step 1/ Download and print the following activity sheet. You will need a copy of each template within this document per child.

Click here to view/download the activity >>

Step 2/ Print a selected on painting from NERAM’s Hinton Collection online here >>

If you need any help or need access to a colour printer, contact education@neram.com.au