inside the hive
Artists collaborating with bees offer a softer model of making that’s shaped by patience, shared labor, and a willingness to let another species enter the work. Inside the warm dark of a hive, sculpture begins with a surface, a cavity, or a frame left open to a world that moves by scent, temperature, and collective instinct.
The artist may prepare the form, coat it in wax, place a queen at its center, or set an object among thousands of workers, but from that point the work starts to belong to a different order of making.
Ren Yue, Yuansu II, 2013-15. image courtesy the artist
making room for another species
This is where the work begins to connect with themes of soft world-making. The process calls for patience, restraint, and attention to rhythms outside the human schedule. These artists are still making decisions, sometimes very precise ones, but the finished object depends on a colony’s behavior, its appetite for a certain cavity, its comfort with a surface, its response to gravity, and, not to mention, its will to build.
The works can be read as craft, sculpture, design, or ecological experiment, but method is the real subject. Each artist creates a condition where bees can act within the work. A sculpture becomes a place of negotiation — a vase becomes a hive, a human figure grows a second skin, and a found object is slowly claimed by honeycomb.
Aganetha Dyck, Masked Ball. image © William Eakin
anna hulačová’s living interiors
Anna Hulačová works from a place that’s bodily and symbolic, as her sculptures draw from agriculture, folklore, and beekeeping practices. She often uses concrete, wood, and honeycomb to create figures that feel part vessel and part organism. In a recent interview, Hulačová explains that she has worked with bees in sculpture for more than ten years, leaving it up to the bees to decide whether a cavity is attractive enough for them to expand into.
Her method often involves carving cavities into the facial or abdominal areas of sculptural bodies. During swarming season, bees can enter these spaces and build honeycomb within them. The comb reads like an inner organ, a materialized spirit, or a living structure held inside the body. In Hulačová’s work, collaboration feels intimate. The sculpture gives the hive a space to enter, and the bees give the figure an interior life.
Anna Hulačová, Dialog, 2024. image courtesy Hunt Kastner and the artist
garnett puett and the apisculpture
Garnett Puett brings this conversation close to beekeeping itself. Born in Hahira, Georgia, and now based in Kona, Hawaii, Puett is a fourth-generation beekeeper whose works, which he calls apisculptures, bring sculpture, performance, and bee partnership into a single process. His gallery describes the bees as artistic collaborators, a phrasing that feels especially direct in his case because the method comes from long familiarity with the hive.
Puett often begins with a figurative armature. The body is shaped, coated with beeswax, and placed inside a bee environment, where the colony adds comb across the form. The bees soften the contours and interrupt the human figure with their own architecture. What starts as a body becomes a shared surface, part sculpture and part record of hive activity.
Garnett Puett, Forged Dance; Entropic Subconscious Matris (4), 2019. image courtesy the artist
ren yue and the limits of control
Beijing-based artist and beekeeper Ren Yue, also known as Ren Ri, works with bees to occupy hollow geometric vessels. The artist places a queen bee at the center of a transparent geometric structure. The worker bees build around her, following the social logic of the colony. Every seven days, Ren changes the position of the box through a roll of the dice, altering gravity and disrupting the direction of the growing comb.
The method makes collaboration feel charged. Human control is present, even theatrical, yet the bees still build according to their own behavior. The finished forms hold that tension inside their waxy geometry. Ren’s work is useful here because it avoids an overly gentle reading of interspecies practice. Working with another species can
involve guidance, pressure, accident, and unease.
Ren Yue, Yuansu II, 2013-2015. image courtesy the artist
hilary berseth’s programmed hives
Hilary Berseth approaches the hive through structure. In his Programmed Hive series, he designs frameworks out of materials such as plywood and polystyrene foam, then introduces honeybees into the structure so they can complete the work through comb building. The phrase “programmed hive” matters because it points to the split between human planning and insect construction.
Berseth’s works have an architectural quality. The artist draws the first condition, almost like a plan, while the bees resolve the form through instinctive labor. Their additions can be dense, uneven, and strangely exact. The final sculpture records both systems at once: the framework imposed by the artist and the collective intelligence of the colony.