The Latest Buzz from the Beehive State

A bee adds to the hexagonal structure of its honeycomb.

I love small flying things both furry and feathered. It started, I believe in Buhl, Idaho where we had a row of mountain ash trees in front of our house. When they bloomed they attracted thousands of honeybees. I loved to go out with a quart canning jar and see how many I could gather in it. I wouldn't stop until more escaped than were captured each time I opened the metal lid to try and squeeze one more in.

The magic number was around thirty. When I released the bees, they never scared me or stung me; I stood with no fear in their midst.

I graduated to bumblebees. My sister Lissa likes them too, well enough to pet the unlikely aerial acrobats when they land on the flowers in her lovely garden.

In recent years I have transferred all of this affection  and awe to hummingbirds.

But this spring, as a neighbor turned beekeeper and his wandering swarms visited our apple tree, resulting in more fruit than ever before, my thoughts buzzed back to my little friends from days before.

Then last month, both beecause I like bees and for the beewildering potential for puns, I went to a lecture by artist Rose-Lynn Fisher who had taken a seriously close look at bees—with an electron microscope. As she examined the curve of the bee's eye, she noticed that it was made up of hexagons, the same shape that makes up the honeycomb in a beehive.

A bee's eye at 370x magnification.

Could it be that what a bee sees somehow influences what it creates? A scientist told her that hexagons are just nature's efficient way of packing circles together; but her artist's soul expressed to her that this similarity in structure was much more than convenient coincidence.

Beeyond the bee-yootiful images and the hexagon connection, the artist engaged in punning, showing the bee's knees, the beehind (including a closeup of the stinger, because that's the point) and ended by reminding us all that beauty is in the eye of the bee holder. I left wanting to get me a hive.

Duly impressed, I am trying to get permission to print some bee scans in Bee Why You Magazine. (Okay, I'm done with the puns for now.)

The photos and some live bees are on display in BYU's Bean Museum, not far from Shasta the Liger. But that creature is another story, or maybe just a song, for another day.

To read the artist's lovely introduction to her bee art and to see the stinger or bee's knee, you can follow this link: http://www.rose-lynnfisher.com/beepage.html