Maria was invited as a visiting artist to teach a Honeybee and Shaker movement workshop to Kevin Clancy and David Pohl’s 7-9 year olds in Pittsburgh. ARTLAB: UTOPIA was a two week intensive for kids, part of The Mattress Factory’s summer programming.
The little workers covered a lot of ground in just 3 hours. Introduced to the similar communal systems shared between Honeybees and Shakers, they learned about the importance of the communication, cooperation, and hard work within the community, the complex relationships between individuals and their roles, and processes such as pollination, festooning, gift drawing, and dancing. Read more about such analysis and comparisons in the “Discussions” section of this blog and check out the lovely photos in Rose Clancy’s Garden Lab.
Learning about Workers, Drones, Queens and the hive as a superorganism
Learning to Festoon to build comb and Swarm to find a new home ^
Doing the Waggle Dance to show the other workers where to find nectar and pollen ^
Depositing pollen in the hive and departing for foraging flights!
