The Umwelt of the Forager: on Bees, pheromones and bacteria
Nov 23, 2018 @ 15:00 Piksel Studio 207, Strandgaten 207 BERGEN
By Anne Marie Maes
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The workshop -the Umwelt of the Forager- will be studying the biosemiotics of the beehive & its ecosystem. The workshop will be organized as a DYI BioLab: the starting point is the role of pheromones and the important task these signifiers play for the communication in the beehive and for the relation of the bees to their ecosystem.The focus of the workshop-lab will be on learning & sharing knowledge by asking questions & discussions. Participants will be sensing the ecology of the beehive and interprete the emergence of symbols. They will be detecting the granularity of waves formed between bacterial signals and the signs emitted through invisible (bio)technologies. In several hands-on sessions the microbial sphere in and around the beehive will be studied under the microscope. Participants will prepare agar plates to culture bacteria and spores that they collect at the intersection of places, called the Umwelt of the Forager (bee). They will ‘design’ with bacteria and reflect upon shared habitats for bees and other micro-organisms.
- Day 1:*- introduction to the Intelligent Guerrilla Beehive project, introduction to the functioning of a bee colony and the relation of the honeybees to their Umwelt.- prepare agar plates and introduction to DIY swabbing kit – we will make swabs of the ecosystem and put the results to culture in the petridishes, to study them later under the microscope.- we will collect plant samples from the local ecosystem to study under the microscope, to understand the relation of the flowers and the bees.
- Day 2:*- introduction to samples of biomaterials (microbial cellulose, bioplastic, bacterial designs).- inoculation of cotton fabric with bacteria (Janthinobacterium lividum) to make a personal bacterial design; make the agar plates and make the LB-food for the bacteria- microscopic study of local plant samples.- drawing blueprints for Shared Habitats and fix them with bioplastic in a petridish
Organised by Piksel and funded by Nordic Culture Point
