Bee A Conversation Starter

Do you envision your garden as a bumblebee highway? Are you an urban citizen-scientist or gardener who is developing your very own native bee oasis? Are you yearning for an aesthetically eye catching ceramic sculpture that ignites conversations with friends when they enter your yard? Perhaps you are intrigued to hear more about how a Bumbleship™ can be beneficial for urban dwelling bumblebees? Here are a few tidbits from our research.

Bee Affected

In his article The Aesthetic of Affect, Simon O’Sullivan points at the function of art:

to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens us up to the non-human universe that we are part of. 

Bumbleship is a sculpture that offers a way for you to connect more deeply with your surroundings through a very personal act of developing the aesthetic in your yard. Through this aesthetic act, you are also opening up the possibility of developing a deeper connection to our little friends, bumblebees.  

Bee Tough

There are many cute wooden bee houses currently on the market, aimed at attracting solitary bees or bumblebees. However, due to the harshness of Canadian weather, especially now because of climate change, these products deteriorate quickly, or require a lot of upkeep to maintain. We’ve tested our ceramic Bumbleship against wooden bee houses, and found that our product is highly weather resistant and durable. Bumbleship will provide you and bumblebees with many more years of hassle free service than wooden alternatives.

Bee Cool

As we are faced with more heat waves like the one in 2021, wooden bee houses will eventually be unsuitable as bumblebee habitats due to excess heat absorption. Bumblebees prefer to keep their nesting habitat at a temperature of around thirty-degrees celsius, which is optimal for the health of their colony. Not only does the choice of using ceramic as a material make Bumbleship weather resistant, the insulative properties of ceramic also makes it resistant to heat absorption.

During the summer of 2021 we tested the insulative properties of the early Bumbleship models and found that the external temperature of the ceramic sculpture was roughly ten-degrees celsius lower than wooden objects in the same location. When internal temperatures were taken, Bumbleship was up to five-degrees cooler than its external temperature. The first iteration of Bumbleship was cast with a very thin wall, and still provides better heat resistance than thicker walled wooden bumblebee houses. With heat regulation in mind, we plan to make the current version of Bumbleship have a wall that is at least three times thicker to improve its insulative qualities.

Bee Versatile

In Alberta there are twenty-nine different species of bumblebee. Most of Alberta’s bumblebees nest underground, in abandoned rodent dens. Meanwhile, a smaller portion of this bumblebee population is known to nest in trees, making their homes in holes formerly occupied by birds. Bumbleship is designed to function as a nesting habitat for tree dwelling and ground dwelling bumblebees living in urban spaces. It can be hung from a tree in shaded locations around your yard, or partially buried in the ground near your garden. When buried in the ground the entrance remains visually available for interested bumblebee queens and curious citizen-ecologists like you.