“Where the bee sucks, there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie…”

Writes Professor Kristian Demary:

At the Best Bees Company Urban Beekeeping Laboratory and Bee Sanctuary (UBL) that I direct, my associates and I focus on what enhances the health of honey bees.  We are presently assessing DNA values of honey to measure queen health, the presence or absence of the unicellular parasite Nosema ceranae, and the diversity of the flowers on which the bees gather pollen.  Together or alone, queen health, Nosema ceranae, and floral diversity incline a hive to thrive or fail. Because Nosema ceranae now constitutes an acute challenge to numerous colonies, we have been testing an all-natural anti-fungal treatment on honeybees and, accordingly, we are testing mated queens for the presence or absence of Nosema ceranae.

This summer we have also been testing how honeybees communicate. We are studying their waggle dances in observation hives (honey comb enclosed in glass) by video recording their behavior under varying experimental treatments (see pictures attached). How intensely and frequently they waggle dance varies under different conditions.

And we’re expanding. We’re about to undertake significant research within the city limits of Boston. The Urban Bee Laboratory has purchased five vacant lots from the City of Boston to turn into productive urban farms and apiaries.

Maybe best of all, MassArt students are contributing to our work. Two MassArt students, Greg Maslin and Ethan Drory, will be working on art+science projects on the farms this fall.  Greg is now learning beekeeping, honey harvesting, and hive box building. He’s fabricating twenty-seven cube container displays to make visible to visitors how various specifies interact.  Ethan is constructing an aquaponics (fish and plants symbiotic) system.

Next on my wish list? A greenhouse here at MassArt to serve both as a productive farm and a ‘living laboratory” where students and faculty could behold, up close, how living things live by sustaining each other.