What's the Buzz? Beekeeping and Dolls!

In his classic Dolls and Puppets, Max von Boehn includes human shaped bee hives that are life-sized among this explorations of the word "doll."  Of course, there are other links, but some may surprise  you.  Sylvia Plath was interested in beekeeping and she wrote poems about bees.  Plath also collected paper dolls; her collection is part of her papers, housed in The Lilly Library.  Her body of work includes a poem or two about other dolls and manikins, too.

Of course, there are plush bees, and Anne Geddes inspired dolls of babies dressed as bee, Bee Keeping Barbie, and a bee keeping Our Generation doll.

One brand of honey is sold in a little bear shaped bottle, which I love to save.

Then there is artist Rob Keller of the Napa Valley Bee Company, www.napavalleybeecompany.com.

Keller takes care over one hundred sustainable bee colonies.  In one, he created a "mummified" queen bee inside a plush toy bee.  He often uses plastic toys in beehives; the bees surround them and build tiny "rooms" or mini hives.  They didn't like one statue of a plastic cow and fence and kept knocking down the toy.  In one really relevant work, Keller built  hive inside a Victorian doll house to show the necessary interconnection between humans and bees.   According to author Sarah Trigg, "he was simply looking for a way to seal three dimensional objects when he started placing them in beehives" (Studio Life 245).

For more, see Trigg's Studio Life; Rituals, Collections, Tools, and Observations on the Artistic Process.  You'd be surprised how many of the artists surveyed also collected toys and doll objects as part of their process.  Most were male artists, but there are women, too.  All are collectors of something, some objects will surprise you.  All will inspire you.  Like Rembrandt and Joseph Cornell, these artists used their collections as inspiration for their art.

For an enjoyable  read, try The Secret Life of Bees, and for research, look up the work Otto Plath did on bees and other subjects; he was Sylvia's father.  Of course, Plath's work is awesome, too.

If you think about it, it makes sense.  Dolls and bees both inhabit miniature worlds, albeit in different scales.