Laura Joelsson, Special to The Denisonian
The little structures are one part science and one part art, and they are all about creating a safe place for Ohio’s native bees.
The “bee hotels” dotting the Denison University campus in Granville are a collaborative effort by students in the Studio Art and Biology departments, who worked together to create and monitor safe spaces for some of the 500 species of bees in Ohio.
Denison’s efforts to protect and nurture native pollinators include a project to fill the university’s 10-acre solar array in its Biological Reserve with pollinator-friendly plants and by installing the bee hotels, which can be seen dangling from tree branches and university buildings on campus.
In 2021, Denison was named a “Bee Campus” by Bee City USA, a nonprofit based in Portland, Oregon, which works to motivate communities to sustain native pollinators of crops, fruits, vegetables, and flowers.
In Ohio, the native bee populations are decreasing by up to 40% every year, according to Bee City USA, so encouraging reproduction is vital to their survival. The bee hotels were created as a habitat for native bees to lay their eggs, which encourages the rebuilding of the bee population.
The hotels were built by the studio art students in a mixed media and sculpture class with Dr. Micaela Vivero and monitored by biology students under the supervision of Dr. Andrew McCall. The art class produces about 18 hotels each semester.
Vivero has been teaching Studio Art at Denison for 18 years, focusing primarily on sculpture and installation art. She said that “the native bees usually find places to nest in lawns or trees, but they can’t really do that on this campus, so the bee hotels provide more chances for them to inhabit that space.”
Vivero said that another benefit of the hotels as art is that they “encourage students and those coming to campus to ask what these things are, and then they get to learn about the native bees.”
The hotels are made of untreated wood and special straws to provide nesting space. The students found that straws nearly the same diameter as the bees seem to be preferable, as well as soft edges around the entrance. These strategies are beneficial, for example, for leafcutter bees, one of Ohio’s native species. Many people think of the honeybee when discussing pollinators, although the honeybee isn’t a native species, having been brought here by European colonizers..
McCall has been teaching biology at Denison for 17 years with a focus on plant biology and evolution. He said that he became interested in bees because people can’t think about plants without thinking about their pollinators, which typically are bees.
“I spent a lot of time just following bees around to see which flowers they prefer, and during that time, I came to the realization that many of these bees seemed to have personalities,” McCall said.
The idea for the collaboration with art and science classes was sparked by Vivero, who later applied for a grant to help bring the ideas together.
“The project that they make has to be outside in nature for years, so it has to be really sturdy,” Vivero said. “The hotels could probably be made in an hour-long workshop, but the ones we have created have been more complex.”
In nature, leafcutter bees will cut off pieces of leaves to line the chambers of twigs to house their young. The straws seen in a lot of the hotels are made to mimic the twigs so that bees will use them to lay and hatch their eggs.
“My class would look to see if the straws had been inhabited, as well as if the physical structure of the hotel was attracting bees or other organisms,” McCall said. “If you’re going to make a free apartment, you can’t decide who’s going to come in, so sometimes ants will raid the bee cabins … and parasitic wasps also pose a big issue.”
When the hotels begin to fall apart, they are moved out of circulation and replaced with hotels from the latest class.
“I think it helped my students think about how we can give nature a little bit of a push but also do it in a creative way,” McCall said. “The students get to see how people with varied interests can work on the same project.”
Jade Rasmussen, a senior majoring in creative writing and minoring in studio art, took the mixed media sculpture class in the fall of her first year at Denison.
“The class really showed Dr. Vivero’s talent as a professor, and her teaching was so animated,” Rasmussen said. “I felt really inspired and encouraged as an artist, even when trying something I’d never done before.”
McCall said that’s one of the goals.
“Art is very much like science in the sense that you’re always exploring. … The artists that I’ve known are always thinking about pushing ahead and trying experimental things,” he said.