Abstract
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.
Highlights
From childhood days of following bees in the garden, to the culinary delights of honey and the wide variety of fruits and vegetables available through pollination, it is well appreciated that bees are an essential part of our modern lives
Estimations of the contributions of bee pollination to food production for human consumption is valued in the range of 235–577 billion US$/ year (Potts et al, 2016), with the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations highlighting the potential impacts of climate change on bee pollination and food production (Kjøhl et al, 2011)
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
Summary
From childhood days of following bees in the garden, to the culinary delights of honey and the wide variety of fruits and vegetables available through pollination, it is well appreciated that bees are an essential part of our modern lives. This ancient neural pathway is hypothesised to be a shared evolutionary trait between some species, as music and birdsong have been reported to produce similar neuro-aesthetic responses in their respective listeners (Earp and Maney, 2012) To inform such debates, Westphal-Fitch and Fitch (2018) argue that to build a better understanding of aesthetics and human perception, research must incorporate a rich and thorough understanding of human proclivity required to acquire aesthetic culture, and suggest that ‘artwork’ needs to include productions across long-time frames including visual art, musical works, architecture, and a wide range of patterned objects such as tapestries, jewellery, tattoos and pottery. In particular, to understand how bees have been represented in artwork through time and across cultures and mediums, and explore why such representations may have been important at that time, and remain important to art today
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