Daily bee drawing
My history and interest in bees starts in Vojvodina with a great-great-grandmother whose marriage dowry was a queen bee. My grandfather carried on the family tradition, nurturing the decedents of that queen bee until his death. He often spoke about the environmental changes he was noticing through his observations of his hives. He worried about pesticides and the infamous Varroa mite. The colony that he tended collapsed along with many others in the region during the NATO bombings of Serbia in the 1990’s. He passed away shortly afterwards, leaving me an inheritance of 500 kilos of honey that was exposed to radiation and unsuitable for consumption.
I learned from my grandfather that every hive has two queens, a sexually mature queen “in charge” and an emergency queen as back up. Over the last year I have been drawing a queen a day as a daily practice, a discipline to think of the bees importance, as well as a feminist nod to Hokusai who allegedly drew a tiger every day.