Beehive Archive
Beehive Archive
wood, paper- pressed and sliced from a book, The English Dictionary / 2008 / 6.5“ x 13“ x 5.5"
Beehive Archive is based on an actual hive body, although miniature. The hive resembles a tiny mating nucleus (nuc), which beekeepers use to make splits of established colonies. Beekeepers also start new colonies by grafting queen cells onto the frames. Instead of filling the frames with honeycomb or queen cells, sections of a book were fitted to the frames. The English Dictionary was sliced and compressed until the physical text on the pages transformed into an indiscernible language. The hive as archive. A hive is a storehouse in constant flux, a collection of materials and resources sampled and curated by the bees.