B-Code V3.1 in the laboratory. Experiment was concluded after three months of hive activity in this artificial environment. Bees were able to build substantial food reserves, and population continued to increase after queen mated and swarm began building comb.

For more on the methods and how-to for building this project, click here.

As a beginning beekeeper, I was informed on how bees build and repair comb in the wild by performing extractions where I relocated hives from buildings and structures where they aren’t wanted into proper hive boxes where colonies can be managed. This particular extraction took place at Bloomfield farm in Petaluma, and was one of two hives in an old barn that I rescued that day. In this photo I’m using rubber bands to secure brood comb until the bees can repair it and attach it to the wooden frame.

Photo by Gillian Bostock Ewing

I’d already established that bees would fuse and repair any sections I modified in a sort of sculptural collaboration. Now I wanted to test whether or not I could “program” them to build comb in a way that they’d never do in nature, and I wanted to document their process. Bees have a lot of programming hard-wired in, such as a yes or no stimulus similar to binary code. They’re one of the inspirations for cybernetics. Now I wanted to see if I could program them to “3D print” on templates that I created for them, altering their own biological B code that gives them the X Y Z coordinates for building.

My first prototype for B-Code was a simple modification of standard rectangular hive boxes used in the most common system for beekeeping in the US, patented in 1852 by Lorenzo Langstroth. These hive boxes had moveable shelves and contained a camera housed behind anti-glare acrylic. This would sit above a conventional hive.

Bees don’t see in the red spectrum, so I used red LEDs to illuminate the work, then took black and white video.

It quickly became obvious that the acrylic needed more ventilation when condensation collected inside and made the bees miserable, so it was back to the drawing board. I was also still learning as a beekeeper, and this exploration really expanded my understanding of bee behavior.

This was the second prototype for B-Code.

This version was perfect for observation, but still had issues that made it unsuitable for housing bees. But I was in a residency that regularly invited the public to view our projects, and this was an early prototype that employed vents to reduce condensation inside.

This is the first use of the internal light rod for illuminating the hive from within. This was to highlight the comb from the inside rather than shining light onto the bees themselves. The light could be adjusted from red to white, but was to be left mostly in red mode so as not to disturb the bees.

I hadn’t yet met all of the design parameters for B-Code, which were the following:

optimal housing for bees to regulate temperature and humidity for brood health

optimal ability to document comb building

storage and shipping: components of the enclosure must either flat pack or nest

replaceable, reconfigurable assembly for adaptation as I learn and adjust the hive for the health of the hive

After the housing for B-Code met with success, it was time to design structural elements and direct the building of comb so that the enclosure could support the weight of a hive. This is the drawing for the internal scaffolding structure inside B-Code.

Some design elements are rods held in tension around a central post, wax template to direct the bees to build on the scaffold rather than the acrylic plates, and the return of the internal light bar.

I’d tested the 3rd version of B-Code and had established that a hive could live happily in this artificial environment. Now it was time to redeploy it with better structural elements and the 3D print template to direct the bee’s build building. This composite photo illustrates how the templates and structure looked before being occupied.

B-Code, Live at the LAST Festival in San Jose, Summer 2017.

This is version 3.2, and a swarm has just been placed in the rebuilt printer. Visitors could look into the hive and watch bees at work, 3D printing their collaborative sculptures on the templates provided for them.

A few weeks after San Jose, B-Code was invited to show at The Exploratorium, a science museum in San Francisco. Bees had been in version 3.2 of B-Code for about a month, so still not too heavy that I couldn’t safely transport them to an indoor space for a few days. During the show, the entrance for the bees was closed and bees were given supplemental honey so they didn’t go hungry. In this photo, high school explainer Mary Claire leans in close to listen to the bees and feel their wingbeats on her cheek through a screened opening. I watched as people kept returning to see the bees, getting closer and closer with each visit as they felt more comfortable. Some put their noses to the mesh to smell the bees, others listened. I spent most of my time there talking about bee biology and answering the endless questions generated by this work.

B-Code is complete and the comb has been completely filled in with the radius pattern I’d configured for them rather than the linear sheets they typically build. But the bees are too happy for me to kick them out. I’ll post again when they have vacated the hive and I can pull all of the plates off…

I do a lot of stuff, and everyone needs a hobby. Beekeeping is not one of those, as I have been working professionally as a beekeeper since 2008. See my other website, www.jennifer-berrybees.com for more information.

About 3-D printing and the inspiration for the name “B-Code”

From July 2014 to Jan 2016 I was an artist in residence at Autodesk’s Pier 9 Workshop in San Francisco. It was during this time that I developed B-Code. I was inspired by the honeycomb pattern that 3-D modeling software would generate to fill the interior cavities of models when sending them to a 3-D printer to be built. I had brought in some chunks of comb that the bees had fused together after I placed them under the inner cover after an extraction. I’m shy, and these pieces were an icebreaker for me when folks came to see me working at my desk. Over time I realized that it would be a great project to play with the similarities between the way bees generate comb and the G-code and machines that build 3-D prints.

3D printing is what people call this process now, but Additive Manufacturing, as it is known in the engineering and prototyping industries where this technology was first conceived, has been around for more than 40 years.

The term "3D printing" simplifies the concept so that one can imagine a conventional printer, one that prints on a flat plane consisting of X and Y axis, then add to that a vertical, up and down motion, the Z axis, so that as the material prints, it adds layers one on top of the other, making it 3 dimensional. Simple as that.

Additive manufacturing is similar to how things are formed in nature, in that parts are built up rather than removed from a larger part as in more traditional, Subtractive Manufacturing techniques such as cutting, stamping, and chiseling. Think of heat, beat and treat as the methods of the industrial revolution, and you understand Subtractive Manufacturing.

The vast array of Additive Manufacturing systems are where it gets interesting. I'm not going to delve too deeply here for the sake of my readers, but know that there are print heads that deposit heated monofilament, printers that use lasers to direct heat and sinter powders into a solid form, extruders that deposit concrete and clay, and even systems that glue and cut reams of paper, sheet by sheet, to form their "prints".

The B-Code Biopolymer Printer

I first became involved with Additive Manufacturing some ten years ago in the prototyping industry. At the time we called it "growing" a part, which is a great way to convey this concept, so similar to how nature builds its things. It was the idea of growing parts that became the basis for my development towards a biological 3D printer.

The 3D printer I have designed takes the principles of additive manufacturing and pushes the technology further, towards a more sustainable and ecologically friendly method of printing forms. B-code is revolutionary in that prints are made using a biopolymer that is fully edible, biodegradable, and completely sustainable, without dependency on petroleum, emitting no carbon, and producing no waste.

With the B-Code “printer”, a biopolymer is extruded from a nozzle, in this case the bee's mouth, and is "drawn" in a long thread, one layer deposited atop another and air cured. The extruded biopolymer is made of beeswax, a long-chain alcohol plastic similar to ethylene, formed of esters of fatty acids secreted from the glands of young adult bees.

The chemical formula of beeswax is C15H31COOC30H6I, and contains over 300 individual chemical components, including palmitate, palmitoleate, oleate esters and of long chain aliphatic alcohols. This biopolymer is similar to other early thermoplastics used by humans before more toxic and persistent petroleum-based plastics came into use, including latex, shellac, gutta-percha, horn, and tortoiseshell.

Bees “print” in hexagons with a 2mm deviation, those hexagons gradually deform into circles. The hexagon and circle shapes are no accident, but the result of millions of years of trial and error through evolution, those shapes being the most efficient and strongest use of any material due to its tensile strength and a reduced overall surface area. This allows honeycomb to hold more than 50 times its own weight in honey, pollen and bees.

Bees work using a simple logic similar to codes used in modern computing, including binary code, if-then statements, and go to statements. I call this set of instructions B-Code.

The set of feedback signals that prompt bees to begin building comb include triggers such as a nectar flow, when the amount of available nectar exceeds the demand of the population, and that population begins to grow as a result of those extra resources. The first signal of a nectar flow is crowding, a binary yes or no output.

A Yes output results in the next set of choices, and those are determined by a set of programs that are very deterministic and difficult to change. Distance to nearest comb, depth of cell and cell width are determined by algorithms generated by the dimensions of the bees themselves, a truly Vitruvian architecture. The space between combs equals the distance a bee can reach from where she is standing, known as Bee-space. Cell widths are determined by bees measuring with their forearms, and the depth of cells are determined by Queen-length, the length of the queen's abdomen.

Building comb is just one of many tasks performed by bees, who take on various tasks as guilds, these guilds malleable and determined by factors including age, resources available, and population.

Young bees whose job it is to form wax scales, consume copious amounts of honey to produce biopolymers from the long chain fatty acids of processed honey. Bee's wax glands are located under plates that form the ventral shield of a bee's abdominal exoskeleton, called sternites. Liquid wax is pushed out of these glands onto plates under the exoskeleton, and then stamped into scale shapes before air drying. These stamp plates are called mirrors.

Wax scales are clear and colorless, 3 mm across and 1 mm thick, and they become opaque after bees masticate the scales with their mandibles. Beeswax is workable at a temperature between 91 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit, and hives are generally kept at 92-93 degrees, particularly where brood are being raised. When bees need to make changes to the hive, they simply remasticate and reform old comb and generate new hive configurations as necessary.

Think about this: bees build their homes, nurseries, and factories from a biological plastic that is manufactured by their own bodies, using their own body temperature and body chemistry, with a material that is reusable and poses no demand on other ecological systems or resources. Go ahead, I dare you to be inspired, too.