Sunday 20 March 2011

Dead Bee Collection



I just spent the last two hours sorting through my dead bee specimens that i've been collecting.

I started to collect dead insects for a different project in 2005 and since then have continued to gather flies, wasps, bees, dragonflies, moths and butterflies etc from window sills and pavements.

At Yorkshire Sculpture Park I was able to retrieve all the dead honeybees from around the hive entrances, plus i also collected any dead bumblebees from the park and also any i saw off site during the summer.


For the exhibition I want to present some of the dead specimens in one of the gallery walls, so i spent this afternoon sorting through them all. I can't tell you the stench in the boxes of bees - a really nasty smell. Some of them are half eaten and battered with wings, legs or heads missing, but some are perfectly whole and really beautiful to look at.

1 comment:

  1. If you want to preserve them you need to either dry them completely or freeze them. It's a pity we don't have more collections of dead insects. Right now there's a question about whether or not a 'new' bee pathogen - Nosema cerana - really is new. Older collections of dead bees would very soon answer that one.

    ReplyDelete