Bee Representations in Human Art and Culture through the Ages. Prendergast, K. S., Garcia, J. E., Howard, S. R., Ren, Z., McFarlane, S. J., & Dyer, A. G. Art & Perception, Dec 8 2021. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134913-bja10031
Abstract: The field of bioaesthetics seeks to understand how modern humans may have first developed art appreciation and is informed by considering a broad range of fields including painting, sculpture, music and the built environment. In recent times there has been a diverse range of art and communication media representing bees, and such work is often linked to growing concerns about potential bee declines due to a variety of factors including natural habitat fragmentation, climate change, and pesticide use in agriculture. We take a broad view of human art representations of bees to ask if the current interest in artistic representations of bees is evidenced throughout history, and in different regions of the world prior to globalisation. We observe from the earliest records of human representations in cave art over 8,000 years old through to ancient Egyptian carvings of bees and hieroglyphics, that humans have had a long-term relationship with bees especially due to the benefits of honey, wax, and crop pollination. The relationship between humans and bees frequently links to religious and spiritual representations in different parts of the world from Australia to Europe, South America and Asia. Art mediums have frequently included the visual and musical, thus showing evidence of being deeply rooted in how different people around the world perceive and relate to bees in nature through creative practice. In modern times, artistic representations extend to installation arts, mixed-media, and the moving image. Through the examination of the diverse inclusion of bees in human culture and art, we show that there are links between the functional benefits of associating with bees, including sourcing sweet-tasting nutritious food that could have acted, we suggest, to condition positive responses in the brain, leading to the development of an aesthetic appreciation of work representing bees.
Keywords: Ancient; perception; aesthetics; moving image; iconography; motif; modern; contemporary
8. Discussion and Considerations
Throughout this appraisal we have observed and reflected upon bee representations in human culture throughout early existence to current day, from ancient artefacts to South American and Chinese cultural perspectives, to physical and behavioural aesthetic interpretations of the bees’ attributes, and evolving methodologies within the human creative process. The representations we observe traverse a diversity of art practice, for example: the ancient song lines of First Nation peoples’ culture recording relationships with sugarbag bees in Australia, to the music of the Yunnan Province in China, and the bee-inspired drones in contemporary music. The types of artwork representing bees extend across many domains, consistent with proposals by Westphal-Fitch and Fitch (2018) that this is the type of broad and long-term evidence is required to inform how functional use and cultural practices may lead to aesthetic appreciations for art representing a particular motif. Indeed, the bee appears to be ubiquitous in human awareness and is often a positive reinforcing relationship that provides for us, informs our methods of conception and sharing of knowledge, and the way in which we may contemplate our co-existence for survival and prosperity. In this regard, bees like the European honeybee, South American bees and the Australian native sugarbag bee all produce a sweet-tasting and highly nutritious food like honey, and this may provide a relatively straightforward neurobiological pathway for how a conditioned appetitive experience enables a perceived positive or beautiful experience in an individual, and such an experience may lead to developing aesthetic appreciation for artwork associated with bees. Indeed, we hypothesise that most artwork appears to represent bees that produce such rewards, and this evidence extends around the world and for different bee species. In a similar fashion, bee art may be considered to promote both positive responses that may link to appetitive conditioning and sweet rewards, but alternatively to aversive responses to stings processed by different regions of the brain (see Section 7.2.4). Taken together, these links to how and why different people find bee art representations engaging suggest that aesthetic appeal to engage audience attention extends beyond a beautiful experience to either positive or aversive salient neural representations that cause occasion for artwork to stand out in the mind of the observer (Vessel et al., 2012).
In modern and contemporary arts practice, a ‘collective’ sense of connection to bees is a recurring theme, and how creative endeavours can contribute to further expand our global awareness of the plight of these important insects. Certainly, the mediums through which bees are represented and appraised have diversified, so too have the types of bees being represented. We propose that this is likely due to readily accessible and digestible science communication of which many practitioners are seeking to further the aesthetic capabilities (and legitimacy) of their works. Indeed, we now witness science and technology as an evolving tool and palette for creation, and for some artist such as Wolfgang Buttress (2021b) and AnneMarie Maes (2021) among others, this union is vital to conveying the human story of understanding the world we live in through art.
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