[00:00:00] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:00:00] The strange, weird and wonderful lives of pollinators can be a great source of inspiration for artistic practice. If you remember way back on episode 13, we had Ruth Marsh who would have people send her dead bumblebees and she would supply them with prosthetics and do stop motion animation. We also had on episode 63, Lori Weidenhammer and her remarkable performance art - her "pollinator personas". This week, I'm really excited to bring on the show Sarah Peebles. 

[00:00:30] Now Sarah is a sound artist who's been working with native bees and wasps for over a decade. She has some really wonderful installations both in Canada, but also as you'll hear in this episode a really wonderful new installation in the State Arboretum of Virginia. So in this episode we're going to hear about her art, but the thing I find really remarkable about her work is how tightly integrated it is with [00:01:00] some of the emerging science around native bees that occurred over the last decade. So without further ado this week on PolliNation Sarah Peebles.

[00:01:10] So welcome to PolliNation. 

[00:01:13] Sarah Peebles: [00:01:13] Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. I've really enjoyed listening to your programs. It's an honor. 

[00:01:19] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:01:19] Well, I'm really glad to have you on the show because there's been a long tradition of art associated with honeybees, but this seems to have come at the neglect of unmanaged native bees and wasps. So just to begin with, how did you start down the road of making art associated with native bees and wasps? 

[00:01:37] Sarah Peebles: [00:01:37] Well I guess I must admit I was kind of looking at honeybees, but not because they were honeybees, but because I happened to get some really great recordings that were unusual of honeybees of a friend. I was putting a microphone inside a bottle and putting the bottlenecks up next to a beehive. And starting down a road of looking at audio that would not be a live performance. I'm a [00:02:00] sound artist, I'm also a music improviser, and I've done a lot of that in my life. 

[00:02:07] And I have done a lot of computer assisted music in my life. And I was starting to look at automating some of these sounds and their transformations and how that might happen in a gallery. And at that time that I was starting to think about that, I went to a party and at this party I met Gail Frazier and Gail's spouse is, Laurence Packer and we wouldn't have just started talking about bees or anything, but she asked me, you know, what I was up to.

[00:02:42] I explained some of those things about bees. And we started talking and realized we were from the same district - we're from Minnetonka, Minnesota, both of us. And she's from across the lake. It was amazing, so of course we were delighted to find that out about one another and we started talking.

[00:02:58] So when [00:03:00] I was explaining about the bees, she you know, explained to me that her spouse Laurence is a senior biologist and a melittologist. And I should get to know him and talk about native bees and find out about native bees. And fortunately Laurence was not crazy busy at the time. He was able to have coffee with me within two weeks and he was just finishing up a booklet for the David Suzuki Foundation. He was the primary author, I suppose - I think they're called the Bee's of Toronto or Toronto's Pollinators. It's a pocketbook. 

[00:03:38] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:03:38] Oh, I've seen it! It Is wonderful. 

[00:03:40] Sarah Peebles: [00:03:40] It's a great little pocketbook! 

[00:03:41] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:03:41] We had Scott McIver on the show like a couple of years ago to talk about it. It's really remarkable book. We should put a link in the show notes. 

[00:03:50] Sarah Peebles: [00:03:50] Let's get these things straight. I need to like sort out these two things because there is a small book and a large book. So Scott probably showed you the recent book, which [00:04:00] is much more comprehensive and it is not David Suzuki Foundation, it is City of Toronto. That's called the Bee's of Toronto and that is a part of the biodiversity series. So you can get Frogs or Toronto, Trees of Toronto, Salamanders of Toronto - it goes on and on. So Scott was involved in co-authoring the Bee's of Toronto, along with Laurence and a bunch of other people you should get a link to that, absolutley. It's really like, "hey, you know, your city can do this, anyone's city could do this."

[00:04:31] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:04:31] Okay. So you connected with Laurence at the right time. He's just finishing this up. 

[00:04:36] Sarah Peebles: [00:04:36] He was finishing up an earlier thing twelve years ago. So we're going back in time here. We're going back in time to a tiny book, a pocketbook called something like, Toronto's Pollinators - something like that.

[00:04:50] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:04:50] Oh okay. Yeah, go ahead. 

[00:04:51] Sarah Peebles: [00:04:51] And it also has Toronto's Pollinator Plants so it's a two part thing. And [00:05:00] it wasn't quite finished and we thought that we could do something jointly. He introduced me to the world of bumblebees through James Thomson's lab at the University of Toronto in 2008.

[00:05:16] And he also introduced me to a second stream of inquiry through a citizen scientist, retired professor of physiology. He was a professor of eye physiology, I think, at the University of Toronto - and that's Peter Hallett. So back in 2008, Peter Hallett was doing a lot of citizen science, his own personal kind of investigations of solitary bee and wasp nest sites with grouped blocks.

[00:05:50] And so I maintained relationships with both of those people and started off doing a bumblebee [00:06:00] exhibit that I invited a bunch of colleagues to join me with, so it was a kind of a group show. And Laurence's lab was involved in that group show. So we were able to get the David Suzuki booklet that he had authored with a few other people - the small pocket book to be a part of the show and made some bee trading cards with him and his lab.

[00:06:27] So that was a collaboration with his lab, the trading cards and those went on to be something, I was able to get the Pollinator Partnership to sell. If you wanted to buy them, you could get them from them kind of, you know, nonprofit. And then the rest of the exhibit involved a bumblebee colony that we arranged to get to Thomson's lab and have one of his lab members be our bumblebee scientists to help us.

[00:06:59] She made [00:07:00] sure the colony was okay and raised them and do everything right. That was Jesamine Madison. And she's now professor, as you probably know at University of Virginia. So this was back in 2008.

[00:07:15] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:07:15] Oh, okay. That's really fascinating. So you made a connection with some people who are really at the forefront of a lot of things at the time.

[00:07:26] Sarah Peebles: [00:07:26] Yeah. And you know it went in a really important direction to me personally. Not only was it a really important installation that really got the community involved, boy, were they interested! Because the colony was inside and it went to the outside, so this is all documented on the site, the Resonating Bodies' site that I began at that time, the first Resonating Bodies' project.

[00:07:52] But by the sixth week of the colony actually the queen died at 4:00 PM the [00:08:00] last day of the show. I mean by 4:00 PM I noticed she was dead, let's put it that way. And because of our connection with Thomson's Lab, we were able to get Michael Otterstatter to do a thorough analysis on the queen and the parasites.

[00:08:17] So we got a pathology report. He put it in writing for me, exactly which parasites they found in at what levels. And you know, this is a part of the ongoing discussion of colonies that are reared commercially. This was a commercially reared colony only because we didn't have enough people to be involved in getting our own queens from the wild. Which we would have loved to do, but you know, you have to have enough people to make sure you get a colony out of all those queens that you kidnap, and that's another conversation.

[00:08:56] But this [00:09:00] managed colony, as you know, there are ongoing investigations about what goes on with pathogen transmission and the colony health basically of managed bumblebees - it's a really big issue. So, because that happened, I took that as an opportunity to make us a specific page in our art summary of this exhibit and I addressed that. I think we had four scientists that we we're getting feedback from. 

[00:09:47] And throughout the whole thing, Steve Buckman was also a part of this. He came up and he gave a talk. And so I got the input from four people [00:10:00] on their opinion about the subject matter. And at that time, Michael Otterstatter was the person who knew the most in the world at that moment about how pathogens are transmitted on flowers from the feet of bees. And so they weighed in and they quoted the literature of the time. 

[00:10:24] So that's still up, you can still view it - I called the page, "art and ethics". Because it was really important to talk about, "do we do this?" And, you know, I was very specific about saying, "don't do this, don't get managed bumbles, just don't do that, get your own." 

[00:10:43] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:10:43] The other thing that sort of comes to my mind is you know, this exhibit and this kind of confluence of people happened at a time when honeybees were really in the news. Native bees and certainly not [00:11:00] native wasps were really kind of on the horizon. Was that difficult or was that a kind of asset for you in your art? Because I imagine whenever you deal with honeybees and honeybee art, you're dealing with all sorts of cultural familiarity. And even with bumblebees, I imagine with bumblebees that artists trade off the familiarity of bumblebees. But when you start to get to things like solitary bees, most people don't even know they exist. 

[00:11:33] Sarah Peebles: [00:11:33] Well, I think the way I'd put it is it's a liability, not an asset in any way that our archetype of bees are singular and our singular archetype. And I say "us" as in mainstream society. I mean, I just learned the other day that there are some societies in other parts of the world that [00:12:00] have longstanding associations with some other bees. But yeah, for the most part, honeybees are the primary archetype. And so people including myself, don't know the difference between a bumblebee and a honeybee anyway. I mean, you think that they do the same thing, right? You don't have a mental image what their biology really is, and what's really going on with them.

[00:12:22] And so I've always found it a struggle because it's really hard to steer the conversation away from what people immediately associate with. So their associations bring forth the same questions over and over and over again, which doesn't help them learn anything about what I'm trying to show them. If I can find a situation where, you know, we don't have to talk about honeybees whatsoever. We can have a much more in-depth conversation about native bees. 

[00:12:56] So it kind of goes back to the idea of [00:13:00] archetypes and how do you create a new archetype or how do you add to the archetype you have? Even though these are different, you asked me if it's an asset. I mean, the unfamiliarity of native bees might be an asset in that people see something they've never seen and they're really interested on that level. 

[00:13:26] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:13:26] I was looking at some of the work that you've produced, these installations, sound is a very important part of it. And in some ways the way that you posed it earlier with honeybees, people already have expectations. But it strikes me with your work that it's very surprising to people. It must be the the experience of hearing a bee, you know, unload a pollen load into a cell is kind of miraculous in some ways. And it really, unavailable to most of us. Most of us will never see that ever [00:14:00] happen or hear it. 

[00:14:02] Sarah Peebles: [00:14:02] Well, I think, the way I would describe the kind of phenomena that I'm making available, it's like a phenomena and I tripped upon it. It's not something I knew existed in except that I was, you know, doing some experiments with what sorts of amplification I was going to use. And one day I turned an nest block, I had some nest blocks that, you know, there were too many for the holder and I turned them sideways instead to make them fit. 

[00:14:31] So I found that when I was watching and listening that I could see in cross section a great bunch of detail you couldn't see from above. It was something that was a natural to me to want to see while I heard, because at first I could only see bees come and go from the outside of an nest block. And, you know, the nest blocks are similar to what they had used in the past. With leafcutter bees or other managed bees - [00:15:00] blocks that are stacked on one another with grooves. And you could see from the outside, as an audio artist, I'm listening to stuff all the time. But I wanted to see what was going on.

[00:15:12] So yeah, I was like, "tell me what's going on inside". I had a little bit of more knowledge than your average person about what was going on, on the inside. But in order to access that I started setting up these blocks in different ways to see and hear what I was looking at. So then I found that the experience was seeing a bee in cross section coming in and out of their tunnel, unloading pollen, bringing leaves or mud or resin. It was that I was using a loop and headphones that made me have a really distinct experience that I thought was really valuable.

[00:15:58] Because what happened is a [00:16:00] psychological phenomenon. It goes in to your brain or how do we put it? You jump in scale when you do that from being the scale of a human to the scale of a small thing - because you're using a good magnifying lens, preferably a loop. And you know how to use it, so it's right up to your eye. And when you have the headphones on you're hearing microsound. You're not hearing, as you would normally expect with a microphone. 

[00:16:30] You're hearing an accelerometer embedded in wood. It's picking up really small sounds of the legs are, which are brittle against wood. And pollen as you mentioned it's got a kind of a squishy sound, different leaves have different sounds. But because you're seeing that in tandem with what you're looking at and you are the dimension - you are the [00:17:00] scale of what you are watching. It's trippy, that's the best word. It's trippy, really trippy. So the more, you know, the more engaging it becomes. 

[00:17:14] So as you learn more and more about what is going on, it becomes more engaging because you see the layers of what might be going on in the present or that had gone on  last year that's still there and is being modified by present activity. And what's interacting with what, it really goes really quite deep. And so I'm always looking for innovative ways to try to get these installations a venue and a presenter to get a good depth of presentation. So [00:18:00] that's a very big challenge I think, to get beyond "bee 101” that’s hard. 

[00:18:05] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:18:05] Yeah, I can imagine. Well, maybe just back up - so this work is not presented in a gallery. This is an outside activity, we'll have some various links in the show notes. There's some great videos that people can see. But just kind of walk us through what the experience of somebody coming to one of these installations is like. 

[00:18:26] Sarah Peebles: [00:18:26] I think I'd like to describe the most recent installation, it has more things going on than before, I expanded what I was doing. So at the State Arboretum of Virginia Blandy Experimental Farm - well, let's say maybe you'd be gardening in the community garden or taking a walk and you'd see an aesthetically compelling kind of sculptural wall with a roof over it.

[00:18:57] And you're drawn to it because it's [00:19:00] beautiful and interesting and hard to know what it is. Probably offering a little bit of shade or something. And when you get there, you're drawn into the architecture of this space. It's a kind of a horseshoe space that's not that big it's intimate. And yet it's big enough to hold maybe, you know, if you wanted to be spacious about it these days, you know, you could have two people. If we were all healthy it could hold five. 

[00:19:30] That's on the inside, but it's also inviting you to walk around the outside and you would see it as sort of earthen type wall. It's made out of clay rich earth with some straw and some aggregate. So it's known as "cobb". It's a building substance that is common throughout the world. And it has some patterns that have been I [00:20:00] should say kind of like scraped into it, which are semi-random, but not totally random.

[00:20:05] And it's got evidence of insects doing things in it. So if you're there particularly like right now, you see the end of the activity of the bees that want to, or whose biology requires them to tunnel into mud. And so they're attracted to riverbanks and they're attracted to this wall. So you would find yourself pausing and having a really intimate opportunity to get close to bees doing this. 

[00:20:38] You'd probably read the signage that would help you understand that you're not going to get stung, it's okay, they're solitary. And you would notice that there's a cabinet and they have very good signage there at Blandy as well. So you would find yourself easily referring to [00:21:00] some of what you're looking at. If you want to know more as you go along, there's a cabinet embedded into this wall. 

[00:21:07] And this wall has a nice big opening that's suggestive of a window. So it's spacious with views that are interesting as well. And the cabinet that is embedded into the wall is colorful and wood burned. So these illustrations are pyrographic as in wood burned, and they are illustrations of some solitary bees that are living in a cavity, such as twigs or vacated beetle bores.

[00:21:50] And on the other side, on the other door, there are two doors. Are life cycle illustrations of the mud tunnel nesters. The [00:22:00] Anthophora also known as mining bees and they make little chimneys, I guess they are known as chimney bees as well. And along with those bee illustrations are various plants. We've chosen that we know they like and are very common plants you might find them at.

[00:22:16] So you see a little bit of life cycle illustrations they're like diagrams, but done in a style that are sort of pastoral, right? And you realize you can open this cabinet. And when you do, you see headphones and a booklet inviting you to put on the headphones these days, you might be required to bring your own headphones, I'm not sure, but that's likely. 

[00:22:45] There may be a loop lens in the cabinet these days, again, I have to say I don't know quite how Blandy has decided to present, you know, getting your magnification here. [00:23:00] But you're invited then to look. So what you see right away are some plexiglass panes. You can see through them and you see a bunch of tunnels routed into wood. 

[00:23:15] So you're seeing a plank, a wooden plank in this cabinet, it's just kind of fitted into this cabinet. The front of this cabinet, you're probably going to notice bees and wasps coming and going out of it maybe a lot, or maybe from time to time, depending on how many are in there. And so once they fly into it, you can see through the plexi where they're going. 

[00:23:37] And this is routed on both sides. So we used a router but these are not straight tunnels. So this has been a development that I've incorporated over the last few years of many different sizes, the tunnels, which have always been different diameters are not all the same size tunnel. That's really [00:24:00] important.

[00:24:00] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:00] That's important for attracting different bees. 

[00:24:03] Sarah Peebles: [00:24:03] That's right. Yeah. So these are all curved. These are curvaceous tunnels. 

[00:24:07] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:24:07] When people have mason bees, for example, they're used to these perfectly straight tunnels, but these aren't straight.

[00:24:17] Sarah Peebles: [00:24:17] No, at first, I thought, well, if I can get these to be a little bit more like what a beetle bore might actually be, that'd be great. Beetle bores are not nearly as elaborate as these curlicues here. But what I did is I laid out for myself an experiment on a piece of paper to draw one inch apart, four different sizes of tunnels and they need to be an inch apart. And once you start drawing a curve, you realize that all your other curves are dependent upon one another.

[00:24:54] It's actually complicated and interesting. And so I came up with a pattern that [00:25:00] works. Everything's an inch apart at its entrance, they are different lengths and they curve through the wood in various ways. And the technician assisting me with this you know, he put this into a program and so this isn't done by hand. You can tell it's done by machine, that's fine. 

[00:25:22] Because it was done by a machine they were able to very easily do it in mirror image on the other side. So you would notice then, the same tunnel on the other side, aren't inhabited in the same way, right? So that's officially pretty compelling. And so you'd realize you can use the headphones, you realize you can push the start button. There's a button there, a volume button and so you might need to read the sign to really get it, or someone else might tell you if they've already done it.

[00:25:58] So maybe, you know, [00:26:00] either you're alone or you're in a group or whatnot. And when you then have these things together, the loop and the headphones and the cabinet doors are open. You're noticing probably more than one thing perhaps a wasp and a bee or two kinds of bees and two kinds of wasps. 

[00:26:24] It depends on the time of year and depending on location you'll be seeing them build nests, but you know, if it's really early, you might be seeing the pupa emerge as adults and chewing out of the nests. You might be there a bit late in the season and you'll only see pupa. You might see larva, you might see all of these things at once, depending on what's going on in that area at that time. 

[00:26:55] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:26:55] Well, you know, the other thing about this installation in particular, [00:27:00] is that it's both kind of microscopic getting in close, but it's situated in a unique landscape. I think you described it, that garden that you were talking about, but then agricultural land and unmanaged land - it's kind of situated as well in the landscape. 

[00:27:19] Sarah Peebles: [00:27:19] Yeah. That was a really fortunate part of being at the State Arboretum of Virginia. So T'ai Roulston and I had a conversation about where we might put an installation like this and they have a lot of land there. And, you know, some places that we could have chosen from just worked better than others. And so my challenge as an artist is to see what I've got in front of me and to work with it and to try to create art that visually [00:28:00] fits. But then to find, how am I going to frame this for my audience?

[00:28:07] And there are many ways I could frame that. I thought of framing it as a collection of insects. They've got collections of plants, you know, at an Arboretum, collections of trees, of shrubs. Arboretums, you know, historically look at themselves as collections of things that are curated. And this, you could say, that too is a curated collection of native bees that have particular biologies and nesting niches, right? But actually carpenter bees as well are interested in the beams of the roof.

[00:28:47] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:28:47] Oh, okay.

[00:28:48] Sarah Peebles: [00:28:48] Yeah. And so when I asked about the site and I was able to have a lot of conversations with T'ai. Who was really generous [00:29:00] and interesting to talk to. I realized that it was surrounded by these different kinds of landscapes. It was abutted, on one side there's a community garden and another side there is an unmanaged field. On a third side, there were managed collections of pine trees. On another side just behind a small parking lot is well, it's a hill, but beyond that is a native plant trail. 

[00:29:30] Not just trail, but it's a whole swamp and field that is managed as well as a small woodland for native plants. I think it's called the Virginia Native Plant Trail. And then beyond that, so, you know, out in space a bit more, is a conventional agricultural field. And you know, I had a lot of [00:30:00] conversations with T'ai about how they manage land and why and what their specific challenges in Virginia are because they are different than our challenges in Ontario.

[00:30:10] And those are very interesting conversations. I mean, they've got a very warm climate and things are robust. Things that come from elsewhere in particular are robust and so what happens when you get to go and visit there and enjoy this very focused experience because the architecture has brought you into a place of focus and contemplation too.

[00:30:41] It's quite a contemplative place. It's really beautiful. You're contemplating whatever you're seeing, the weather, you're probably enjoying looking at the weather, if you're like me anyway. You're enjoying a lot of things going on around you. So once you you've [00:31:00] seen the bees and been drawn into the bees, you're very naturally looking out, your focus is drawn back out to where you are.

[00:31:10] I mean, usually you want to try to see where they're going anyway, right? They leave the nest, where are they going, you don't know, you lose them, they go. But you realize that there is this landscape here and you may or may not, you know, read all the signage. A lot of people don't read signage. But on the other hand, at this installation and many of the installations I've had the pleasure of doing, a lot of the audiences are people who are regular visitors. 

[00:31:42] And so chances are, they will, you know, read a little bit more from time to time and they will probably see changes over time in the structure. In this case, the structure is designed to change. It's designed to look interesting with chaos, [00:32:00] because who knows where a mud nesting bee is going to choose to make a tunnel and a chimney. As you may know, the chimneys of Anthophora are really fun to look at. They're really crazy. These little mud globular things on the end of their tunnel. 

[00:32:20] And so creating a beautiful pattern of plastering on the outside of this horseshoe like wall, which I should mention it gracefully curves down from probably ten feet or something down to about three feet. So its got this pattern that is going to be looking different to you every time you go - because there will be more bee nests in it and it will have a different appearance and the cabinet and what's inside the [00:33:00] cabinet.

[00:33:01] You know, you might see mostly nests by one kind of bee or wasp per tunnel the first year, but the next year you might see, you know, things that have invaded and competed. And it's really common to see a tunnel that has some mud dauber wasp remnants of last years nest and then a leafcutter bee nest. And then that gets interrupted by a resin bee nest. You know it gets complex and really interesting over time. And yet it's managed, you should know that, the planks are managed so that they swap them out to avoid a big ramp-up in parasites.

[00:33:49] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:33:49] Well, okay, fantastic. That's great. And I think that really gives a good picture of how all the elements integrate this. And also not only the [00:34:00] landscape, not only the bees that are there, but also this temporal dimension - this is a piece that will change over time. 

[00:34:07] Sarah Peebles: [00:34:07] Yeah, definitely. 

[00:34:08] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:34:08] Yeah, let's take a quick break. We'll come back and I have a couple more questions I want to ask you. Specifically it seems like science and art in your work is very kind of tightly integrated. I want to ask some more questions about how that works. 

[00:34:20] Sarah Peebles: [00:34:20] Okay. 

[00:34:22] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:34:22] Okay so earlier in the interview, we were talking a little bit about how native bees and native wasps may be very unfamiliar to your audience. And this poses some challenge to you as an artist, in terms of your sort of broader goals around the artwork. Tell us a little bit about how you've been able to navigate that question. And I guess the other thing that's sort of bound up with that is how do you separate the science and the art? Because there is a way in which like, these are not the same domain.  

[00:34:57] Sarah Peebles: [00:34:57] I think a good way [00:35:00] of describing these things is my goal is to create a mental image of biodiversity, which I found when I first read the very first thing that, Laurence Packer told me to read. He gave me two reading assignments, he said "here, read these two things." Read, The Forgotten Pollinators by Stephen Buchmann and Gary Paul Nabhan and read, Bumblebee Economics by Bernd Heinrich. And I realized I had not had a mental image of biodiversity until I read particularly, The Forgotten Pollinators, but actually both really.

[00:35:34] And how do you create a mental image of biodiversity and art? That's a pretty tall order. That's hard to do. And so that's one thing on my mind, the other is maybe just a rephrasing of that question is, telling the story. So I'm trying to tell the story of native bees. I'm trying to tell a story of pollination ecology. I'm trying to tell a story of biodiversity. 

[00:36:00] [00:36:00] And so knowing that most people know either nothing at all, or, just some rudimentary things about the inhabitants of these cabinets. I realized I really should have then some illustrations on the outside of the cabinets, because most of the time, you know, you're there by yourself. You're not going to be able to ask anyone any questions. 

[00:36:23] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:36:23] Yeah. That's the way you described it. As somebody walks up and they encounter the installation and then they're like, "what's this?" That might be many people's experience. 

[00:36:32] Sarah Peebles: [00:36:32] Yeah, and I know that most people are not going to read anything because that's what I've found since doing this. And I started doing this, you know, in the public domain, having worked out all my methods in 2011. And so I found that a very small percentage, tiny percentage of the public is going to read anything. And so I realized that, you know, I'll just have to live with that. I know that many different [00:37:00] experiences will be had and on many different levels.

[00:37:03] So I started out with that approach of illustrations on the cabinet. It also draws you in. So you'll note that, you know, the opportunity to create a habitat wall at Blandy, that was recent. And that was preceded by a sort of a prototype habitat wall at the University of Maryland with Lisa Kuder, we did that together for Dennis vanEngelsdorp's lab. And so before that for many years, it was just the cabinets and remains, you know, the cabinets are just on their own cabinets or booths, larger, smaller iterations of this idea are on their own. 

[00:37:50] And of course, really good signage trying to make that happen as well. And I noticed that with the cabinets. Try as I might, they were not [00:38:00] getting used to investigate at the depth that they really could be. And it's because I think telling the story is so important and because honestly, going to the work to make an outdoor piece of art, that's not going to disintegrate is a lot of work.

[00:38:19] I mean, really you have no idea - to design something and to have a good builder and to make the audio robust and all of this to make the art and not fail, is a lot of work. So I decided that I would try to approach us in a couple of ways. One way that I'm really pleased with is we've been able to have a bee monitoring club. Sometimes it's called the Wild Bee Club.

[00:38:50] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:38:50] Oh, wow.

[00:38:51] Sarah Peebles: [00:38:51] And that's been at two venues here in Toronto because both of them have cabinets and the venues themselves are very involved. I mean, they really love the [00:39:00] cabinets. It's just that the reality of a venue is they only have so many staff and they only have so many ways they can interface with a certain segment of their public because they have programming. And you have more public than you have programming for, right? 

[00:39:23] And also the nature of their programming is probably going to be a bit limited because I forget how much more I know than your average person after ten years of doing this. So I was able to find through another very friendly colleague, there are a lot of really friendly colleagues here in Toronto, it's a great place that way. A professor, Sandy Smith, who's into entomology and forestry, her PhD, student Susan Frye was really interested in interfacing with the public [00:40:00] and was not out in the field. Most people, as you know, are out in the field in the summer, not available, but she was here in Toronto.

[00:40:07] And I was able to through a couple of years, it took more than one year to get the City of Toronto to be interested in doing this and have the venues do it without me doing anything really. We just kind of got them all together and said "here". When I say, I didn't do anything, I mean is I provided them with a document that was my vision of what a bee club could be.

[00:40:30] And we did have kind of a prototype bee club happened the first year there. And so it happened two years and then we got this pandemic year. So that made this year not happen but, that was really great. So what happened? Both venues are very different and have very different audiences. And Susan's interested in the challenge of conveying the story of [00:41:00] native bees and native plants in different ways to different audiences.

[00:41:05] So every week for ninety minutes people sign up and they go, it's free. It's paid for by the city. And the city is a very proactive city, Toronto is a very lucky city because we've got people in parks, forestry, and rec, they like to put those together, who have put a tremendous amount of work into consulting the scientists of the city. And the scientists at the city have put a tremendous amount of work into trying to work with the city to do the best thing. So there's a pollinator protection strategy here. So that in and of itself has been fundamental to tying in with the bee club. So this is part of their outreach. 

[00:41:52] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:41:52] So yeah. So in some ways they're kind of like docents they're there, they have some sense of the experience [00:42:00] and are around. 

[00:42:02] Sarah Peebles: [00:42:02] Well, what happens is Susan gets together for ninety minutes once a week, last year and the year before with eight lucky people who sign up and they're over the age of twelve. And the idea is to familiarize themselves with the architecture of the flowering plants. And understand the connections that might be happening and they catch bees in nets and chill them down and look at them and take photos and talk about it and go to the cabinet and use a cabinet as a reference point.

[00:42:37] And so this helps get the cabinet to a deeper place, right? And of course the story is that the biodiversity details include plants. So bringing that into too, plants and beyond plants. But the plant pollinator relationship, the [00:43:00] coevolution part is huge and really fundamental. So far this strategy of a wild bee club has been to me the most compelling. 

[00:43:14] And I should say another strategy as being to place my venues. So working with the University of Maryland with Lisa Kuder. And we're very fortunate to be connected to Sam Droege, who knew we both had an interest in making a wall. And she was at that time focusing on Anthophora. She and maybe her colleagues were teaching classes at the wall, so they were able to bring their class in pollinators. And I think it's called pollinators under pressure or something like this. And they also had an architecture class, I forget the name of the class, but that was involved in helping [00:44:00] to put a little roof cap on the wall of a green roof so that it wouldn't dissolve in the rain.

[00:44:05] So that's why that was a prototype wall is that we had some ideas about what would work and needed to amend those ideas and try to nudge the wall along. So it will continue to exist and thrive and do really well. And it does, the bees have made a huge dent in that wall. And it's so interesting. And so this is all on my site too, you know, so I have documented all this.

[00:44:31] If you go to the page in Resonating Bodies', that's about "habitat walls with cabinets." Then as you scroll down like a blog, you know, the most recent is at the top. So you'll see the Virginia stuff in year one of last year. I don't have pictures yet for this year of year two. And you can scroll down and you'll see the history behind the University of Maryland and [00:45:00] how it started off and how, you know, how it ended up. You'll see the complex chimney I'm not going to say patterns, they're not patterns, but the wonderful assortment of chimneys that keep popping up on that wall.

[00:45:20] There's some video of it and everything too. And then what's inside. I want to mention that even though, you know, trying to situate these histories for people who don't know when they come to a work - I'm always trying to find innovative and creative ways to document things and do good things with that documentation.

[00:45:48] So, because I have a cousin, Ben Sullivan who lives very near where this wall at College Park is in Maryland. I did ask him to do some [00:46:00] documentation and he likes documenting. And what I did not realize he would do until he did it was, he took a macro photo of, I think I asked him to do some macro photography, but he did it the professional way because he's a professional.

[00:46:19] And he gave me a very large document that he took in thirds. So this is a 17 inch plank, it's 17 inches long, the bee nest plank and it's about eight inches wide. So he took a photo of it in thirds, stitched it together. And so on the site, the same site I just described to you now. You can select it and you can make it bigger and bigger and bigger until you see all the mites in it and at that level they're very, very clear. 

[00:46:54] And so I'm going in both directions at the same time or [00:47:00] multiple directions. There's a direction of trying to find ways to orient people to it. And then there are directions to try to find ways to delve deeper. 

[00:47:14] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:47:14] Yeah. Well, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking time to describe your work to us. I'm looking forward to seeing this work in person myself, when I come out East after all this has done. 

[00:47:26] Sarah Peebles: [00:47:26] Thank you. My pleasure. I must say that when you're there and it's bee season and everything's very active - things feel really alive, you know, objects take on a life and they're so really fun to watch and be around. And so it's a great adventure. Yeah. Thanks. 

[00:47:52] Andony Melathopoulos: [00:47:52] Great work. Thank you so much. 

[00:47:54] Sarah Peebles: [00:47:54] My pleasure.