The highly-acclaimed BEAM installation, which was created using 2,500 logs that were donated by BSW, is to be given a new lease of life before next year’s Glastonbury Festival.
Designed by award-winning artist Wolfgang Buttress, the multi-sensory experience sits pride of place in the Greenpeace Field and is now set to become a ‘bee hotel’.
Bee hotels are man-made structures designed to house solitary bees that nest above ground in holes and mimic the natural conditions that bees need in order to thrive.
Holes will be drilled into the timber posts used within BEAM to encourage solitary bees and other pollinators to live inside the installation following its appearance at this summer’s festival.
BEAM was originally designed to showcase the life of the honeybees at Glastonbury-founder Michael Eavis’s famous Worthy Farm – and it featured over 2,500 logs donated by BSW.
BSW’s marketing manager, James Brennan, said: “It’s fantastic that the BEAM installation is continuing to live on in such a positive way. I’m really pleased that BEAM has not only brought joy to hundreds of thousands of people at this year’s festival, but that it will also continue to remain in pride of place as the home to bees of Glastonbury.
“As a company that works so closely with nature it’s important that we take our environmental responsibilities incredibly seriously – so this project is important to us.”
Of around 250 species of bee found in the UK, the vast majority are solitary bees. Unlike honeybees and bumblebees, solitary bees don’t live together in colonies.
A solitary female bee will make her nest alone. These wild bees are docile and safe around children and pets, making them the perfect residents for BEAM and for next year’s Glastonbury festival.
In the wild, insects such as bees like dark rotting places to make their homes. When BEAM has decomposed to a point where it needs to be taken down, the logs will be stacked in a field to continue to encourage more insects to live there.
The artist behind BEAM, Wolfgang Buttress said: “As humans, we have a symbiotic relationship with the honeybee – they need us to provide hives and we need them to pollinate our food.
“The BEAM sculpture will stay on site until it starts to rot away in a few years’ time, and this is good for insects in general and bees in particular. Historically, honeybees made their colonies in the old rotted trunks of trees.”
Buttress is best known for his sculpture in Kew Gardens, Hive, which won a gold medal at the 2015 Milan Expo and highlights the importance of bees in our ecosystem.
An adaptation of his earlier work, the impactful BEAM display was achieved by using accelerometers which were placed inside a colony of black bee hives located in Worthy Farm at Glastonbury.
The accelerometers monitored the colony’s activity and sent live, vibrational signals to the installation, converting this information into light and sound to echo the activity of the bees. Inside the internal hexagon, Buttress used 12 super-bright projectors to display specifically curated films onto the walls.
Constructing the impressive structure, which consists of the inner 12-metre hexagon and a wider outer diameter of 25 metres, was made possible thanks to the large donation of material from BSW Timber.
