NEMERE KEREZSI

Apiary 2012 (Installation) 


















In the spring of 2010 I had a dream in which I placed the Platonic bodies, the tetra-hexa-, octa-, dodeca- and ichozahedrons in beehives. Before I could find out what the bees did with the bodies, I woke up. During my wakefulness I applied the thoughts from my dream on a comb-press, this was how I could best transplant my ideas about the Platonic bodies into the world of bees. I wanted to understand as much as possible why the ideal geometry of work in the case of bees is the hexagonal comb building, closed by rhombuses. My idea was that instead of the level surface of the regular solids, the bees would be given combs on which I substitute the hexagonal cells with tri-, quadr- and pentangular ones. On the experimental combs the bees received three kinds of cells that were “worse”(tri-, quadr- and pentangular) than what they usually build, and one which is mathematically „better”, the hexagonal cell closed á la László Fejes Tóth. In the case of the equilateral triangles the bees took the crossings as starting points. They cut the sixth of a hexagonal cell from the peaks of the triangles, and thus they built the new cell and remade the triangular grid into a perfect hexagonal one. While in the case of the triangular cell grid it was possible to build the ideally sized hexagonal cells, the bees could be tolled with the quadrangular and pentangular comb grids. They started the building of the cells on the pentangular and quadrangular combs with the rounding of the form, and then they re-angled the cell again. Even though they managed to build hexagonal cells, the size of them significantly differed from the ideal. The most tangible result was that I could show a process regarding which we had only guesses until now. My goal was to collect as much information as possible about how the rebuilding was accomplished: to make an image of the experience. 


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