Thermal Society

ByMetanexus Editors

A bustling society is difficult to visualize in its entirety, even when peering through the transparent window of an observation hive full of honeybees. Some individual behaviors and collective actions are impossible to perceive with the naked eye. To overcome this obstacle, I recently recorded and mapped behaviors of bees using infrared imaging technology. During the course of my scientific research in a German apiary—the BEEgroup at the University of Würzburg—I filmed colonies of honeybees and created thermal visions in which temperature translated into color, and patterns of activity emerged. My thermal portraits feature bees performing waggle dances (communicating direction and distance of desirable destinations to sisters), heating brood, thermally slaughtering invaders, and sleeping. These portraits are an attempt to capture the invisible actions of a society.

The work consists of raw data I am analyzing in my research efforts, as well as a range of snapshots of less relevant behaviors to round out the thermal activities of a honeybee colony. This video is meant to visually tell a natural history story from a composite of clips, as well as highlight the research I am conducting and excite an audience, guided to look at honeybee activities with a new eye.

I modified observation hives in novel ways in order to capture a society’s response to invasion (by wasps), and to highlight behaviors otherwise difficult to discern with the naked eye. Thermal imagery makes the invisible visible by clearly displaying the thermal output of subjects. The palette of colors I selected, interspersed with ROYGBIV still photographs, visually demonstrates the mortally devastating impacts of honeybees’ defense against invading wasps.

 

Barrett Klein creates art driven by biological concepts, and his science—a combination of investigating sleep in societies of insects, and collaboratively exploring communication in frogs fooled by robot doppelgangers—is enhanced by visuals. He works with honeybees to figure out how sleep operates in colonies, and why it might be of specific benefit to its different members, and he has recently begun to image the active brains of sleeping honeybees, extending his reach to visualize subjects with the help of Lisa Rath, Christoph Kleineidam, and Giovanni Galizia at the University of Konstanz, Germany. In his new role as a professor of animal behavior at the at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, he will to juggle and join aspects of biology, scientific visualization, cultural entomology, and art.

Author

  • Barrett Klein is an “entomoartist who fashions ways of exploring, creating, and communicating both science and art primarily with insects at center stage. His parents, Arnold and Karen Anne Klein, both artists owned an art gallery for forty years (www.kaklein.com).  He studied entomology at Cornell University and the University of Arizona, and Ecology, Evolution and Behavior at the University of Texas at Austin, although this academic sequence was split by years of producing natural history exhibits for museums. He also worked at Chase Studio Inc. in southwest Missouri, then at the American Museum of Natural history, roaming its half-lit halls by night and creating insects, giant viruses, and working in both education and exhibition by day. Today, he celebrates insects through his research in biology and cultural entomology, as well as via illustration, film, and sculpture, and he sometimes collaborates with his twin brother, Arno, a scientist at Stony Brook University who images human brains (www.binarybottle.com) . He is a professor of Animal Behavior at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse, where he continues communicating and visualizing science in aesthetically compelling ways.

    [email protected]
    www.pupating.org

Similar Posts