Building for the bees

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This article was published 24/05/2016 (3632 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new housing market in Winnipeg is creating quite the buzz.

The University of Manitoba recently announced the winners of its international Bee/House/Lab design competition. Designers from nine countries submitted plans for homes that would be suitable for tunnel nesting bees, a solitary species of bee threatened by development, insecticide use, habitat loss and climate change.

The challenge, however, was to not only make a home that meets the bees’ needs but also that of their human neighbours.

Chad Morgan Connery, a designer with Crescentwood-based firm Din Projects, and his partner and U of M alumna Anca Matyiku created the winning home in the open category. Titled “Knaves turn’d Honest,” the house is a sleek indigo and red elongated A-frame structure that takes advantage of the biological differences between humans and bees.

“This (is) a project with a pretty stringent brief where you could see the entomology side of it has requirements that they would have to meet,” Connery said. “So rather than designers telling entomologists how to do their job, we thought it was more important to play with the levels of information available to bees and human beings to make more apparent the relationship between the two.”

Indigo is a stimulating colour for bees while the red is imperceptible yet visually significant for humans, Connery explained. Bernard Mandeville’s poem Knaves turn’d Honest (which the home is named after) is also written on the house in UV paint that bees can perceive but the human eye can only make out under a blacklight.

“It uses bees as an analogy for the invisible hand of capitalism, which we thought was kind of funny that they’re solitary bees and it’s talking about a man making his own dollar. There’s a little bit of humour there,” he said.

Megan Krahn, a Wolseley resident currently studying at OCAD University in Toronto, and her design partner Brandon Bergem took the top spot in the student category. Their design titled “subur-bee-a” uses planter boxes and seating areas coupled with a bee house to spur public interaction.

I think it’s important that design means something more than just aesthetics.

Subur-bee-a’s design plays off of the typical gabled roofs used in residential developments but also serves a function for the bees which require specific nesting conditions.

“I think it’s important that design means something more than just aesthetics,” Krahn said. “We’ve come to a point where we need to start focusing on the world and we can’t just focus on the things that humans use as a sole identity.”

The U of M’s FABLab made about 50 bee houses which will be installed at locations across the campus, in public gardens, and at the St. Norbert Farmers’ Market. The field tests will determine which designs are most conducive to the bees and strengthen the population of pollinators in the area.

Robert Currie, head of entomology at the U of M, says the bee houses will help create awareness of the relationship between bees and humans.

“The interest that’s generated from the contest will create more of a connection with the production of local food as well,” Currie said. “A lot of the bee nests that we’re putting out in the context of this competition will be by community gardens.”

He also hopes individuals will be motivated to create bee habitats on their property for the benefit of the local ecosystem.

“(Tunnelling bees) are quite critical for a lot of the native species, the native blueberries and things like that are much more effectively pollinated by the native (bees) than commercial bees,” he said.

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