“The Melissa Garden is a new project that began in the fall of 2007. It is being created to provide honeybees with a place to live natural lives, insulated from known stressors, and nourished in a beautiful setting. The garden is being thoughtfully designed and planted with botanicals that offer year-round nectar and pollen sources honeybees are known to favor.”I love some of the details of the garden, including a door to a workshop, cut through with bee silhouettes, and the round bee skep (Weissenseifener Haengekorb). Plans for it can be bought, or you can occasionally take a workshop at the Melissa Garden on how to make one. The inner core is woven from reeds and grasses, as in old European skeps. The interior frames are in half-moon shapes, can be accessed from the top of the skep, and the bees are able to build their combs off them as they like.
The sanctuary leaders also brought in animal communicator Sharon Callahan to speak with the bees.
“The bees feel that a challenge for those at The Melissa Garden might be criticism from those doing things in more traditional way. Don’t worry about that. No matter how f
ar out, bring in love and the element of fun, and they will be healthy. If you have a dream of a plexiglass castle, try it. The bees want to try whatever comes to us. It isn’t about finding the right hive or right shape. It is about acts of love. The love will heal the bees. Bees don’t want us to be afraid to be far out. We are on the leading edge. The farther out the better, as long as it is done with love.”
(Indeed, nearly every new beekeeper I know has had some struggles in trying to tend bees in a new, non-invasive way, while receiving or perceiving opposition from the so-called "traditional" way, which tends to treat bees like livestock. Read more about this talk, as well as another that Sharon posted on her site.)
ar out, bring in love and the element of fun, and they will be healthy. If you have a dream of a plexiglass castle, try it. The bees want to try whatever comes to us. It isn’t about finding the right hive or right shape. It is about acts of love. The love will heal the bees. Bees don’t want us to be afraid to be far out. We are on the leading edge. The farther out the better, as long as it is done with love.”(Indeed, nearly every new beekeeper I know has had some struggles in trying to tend bees in a new, non-invasive way, while receiving or perceiving opposition from the so-called "traditional" way, which tends to treat bees like livestock. Read more about this talk, as well as another that Sharon posted on her site.)
Bringing the element of fun and love to the work reminds me immediately of Path of Pollen teacher and healer and 5 Rhythms dancer Kate Shela, whose elegant website shows where you can dance with her.
Interesting about the plexiglass house idea, because Canadian artist Aganetha Dyck has already made one! Dyck does collaborative art works with the bees, letting them add their wax and propolis to material items like shoes and drawings that she places in their hives. Her exhibitions smell of honey.
Comparing her work to that of surrealist Marcel Duchamp, in usual high-flown art history speak, Juan Antonio Ramirez reviewed a show featuring a a life-size wedding dress made of wax combs, saying, “Aganetha Dyck’s creation is, finally, a sweet feminine figure: a beehive-woman, emerging like a bright star in nocturnal obscurity, promising an endless ‘honeymoon’. From the mental and parodic undressing of Duchamp, we have passed with Aganetha Dyck to the total possession of the bride through an operation that is olfactory, visual, tactile, and gustatory. The total work of art."
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