“Some were shaped for industry, while others seemed formed for no purpose other than grotesquerie, with misshapen mouths and eyes and gods-knew what.” – China Miéville, The Scar (1)

Beehives are human-made structures designed to house honeybees. While beekeeping involves other tools such as smokers and veils, hives are the core of the practice, differentiating it from other approaches such as honey hunting. As humans couldn’t domesticate bees in the same way they did with cattle, technology played a central role in shaping the human/bee relationship. This relationship evolved and developed through technical adaptations applied to these architectures for bees. Hives brought bees closer to the proximity of humans’ homes, creating a shared living space. This started a long history of different experimental forms of living together between humans and bees. From symbiotic to exploitative, each beekeeping practice expresses in one way or another an attempt to share a space with another species.

Dating from two thousand four hundred years before the common era, the first solid evidence of beekeeping is a bas-relief found in ancient Egypt showing beekeepers harvesting honey in horizontal cylindrical hives. (2) However, the complexity of the practice depicted in the artwork, the importance of bee production for many cultures throughout history, and rational reasoning stemming from ten years of research on the topic allow me to say, with confidence, that the practice of beekeeping predates this bas-relief by at least a few thousand years.

The basic requirements for building a hive are astonishingly simple. Bees need a dark cavity of approximately ten to eighty liters – the size depends on the bee species and the climate – which easily protects them from their enemies. The hive should have at least one but no more than a few small openings, ideally away from the ground, and made from a material that does not get too hot in summer and not too cold in winter. From these basic necessities, beekeepers, turned architects, have built and imagined myriads of designs to house bees. If at first they were directly inspired by bees’ natural habitat, or simply borrowed from it, for example, a cut tree already inhabited by bees, beehives quickly developed into complex machines. Hives are designed according to different metrics which shape a beekeeper’s way of living with honeybees.

Building a log hive which imitates bees’ natural habitat aims to accommodate bees according to their own needs, for example. A hive with two transparent glass sides, designed to observe bees, is used to learn about bee behaviors. Modern hives, the standard wooden box, were patented in the nineteenth century in order to achieve higher monitoring capabilities and increase honey production. I could go on, but ultimately, all these hives, for better or worse, are experiments of living together with bees. Needless to say, hive design is not solely responsible for shaping the relationship between humans and bees. The design of a hive only sketches a path towards a particular practice, a specific way of living with bees. But ultimately, there are other considerations that will define how the hive is used. Different cultural and economic backgrounds can hinder a hive’s initial design and transform beekeeper practices. For example, a modern hive could easily be used for other purposes than intense honey production. A perfect example of how hive technology has been transformed by cultural beliefs is the Bannkörbe. I discovered this unique form of hive while unpacking the history of the beehive and immediately I was starstruck. They are unique insofar as they demonstrate a particular design following cultural beliefs appropriated from grotesque architecture. I was and remain totally mesmerized by them. If we put some more thought into it, what really stands out is not their uniqueness but more the fact that they reveal that hive design was probably way more innovative and complex than we tend to believe. To put it differently, I believe that their uniqueness also stems from the fact that surviving specimens were well preserved, and the fact that this larger tradition survives today shows how much we have lost to history.

Prevalent in northern Germany, particularly in the Lüneburg Heath in Lower Saxony, approximately between the 16th and 19th centuries, Bannkörbe are basket hives made of straw, wood, and cow dung. Translating to “spellbinding hives” in English, Bannkörbe are an oddity of “skep beekeeping.” (3) These hives are distinct due to their incorporation of a wooden mask depicting grotesque and eerie figures as means to ward off the evil eye. Also known as Immenwächter, or “guardians of the bees,” these hives were considered to be unique, and beekeepers usually owned only a few, strategically placed in their apiary, often in the corner. The hives also acted as scarecrows, deterring thieves – humans and other-than-humans – seduced by the value of bees and their products. Today, this tradition has largely vanished, and it is only kept alive by a handful of people, such as artist Birgit Maria Jönsson and biologist Hermann Geffcken, as well as through special wood-carving workshops organized, for example, by the Institut für Bienenkunde Celle. (4) Furthermore, only a limited number of Bannkörbe have withstood the test of time and are now preserved in Heimatmuseen across Germany. (5)

With the rise of garden beekeeping, forest beekeeping (6) declined and the tradition of marking trees to assert property ownership evolved into more complex ornaments expressing the spirit of the hive and its owner, especially in eastern Germany, where log hives were the norm. (7) This tradition evolved from solely carving faces into figure hives – Figurenstöcke in German – for which the anonymous artist transforms the entire log into a sculpture, marking a split with Bannkörbe. While figure hives have followed a more rational path toward theft deterrence and adornments taking inspiration from daily life, such as soldiers, Bannkörbe retained magical beliefs and incorporated pagan symbols, grotesque and eerie figures as their primary inspiration. For this reason, as Geffcken pointed out, a hive such as the Madonnenkorb, with its depiction of the Virgin Mary, should not be categorized as a Bannkorb, since the carved figure’s inspiration stems from monotheist and not pagan beliefs. (8)

Ultimately, each Bannkorb is the product of a specific region, rendering each mask unique. For example, in southwestern Germany and Tyrolean areas, faces are more distorted, inspired by carnival masks. (9) In other regions, the structure of the skep varies according to the local climate, beekeeping traditions, and different bee subspecies inhabiting it. In rare cases, the skep itself takes humanoid shapes, blurring the distinction between figure hives and Bannkörbe.

In material culture, objects such as Bannkörbe are often referred to as apotropaic. In Alfred Gell’s words, they are “demon traps, in effect, demonic fly-paper, in which demons become hopelessly stuck, and are thus rendered harmless.” (10) Throughout history, apotropaic items have materialized in countless forms, from abstract Celtic knotwork that ensnares demons through its hypnotic patterns to horseshoes placed at the entrance of a house. The key feature of Bannkörbe, however, is the mask. By linking this technology with the history of masks, we can trace its cultural origins beyond beekeeping. There are plenty of examples of apotropaic masks within almost every culture, but one in particular seems to have informed these hives. It isn’t, however, a wooden mask, but a stone one—a specific subgenre of grotesque architecture called mascarons. A mascaron is a face mask that adorns a non-anthropomorphic structure, such as architecture, clothing, furniture, or a beehive, and is endowed with magical powers to ward off evil spirits. (11) Often bizarre and distorted, mascarons are grotesque and terrifying figures that simultaneously provoke echoes of laughter from the marketplace. In architecture, they are strategically placed where there is tension, such as the tops of arches and entrances, where they act as guardians of the structure. (12) Meanwhile, these grotesque sculptures reflect the spirit of the house, the inhabitants, and their beliefs. By and large nonfunctional, some mascarons become actual passages, such as fountain mascarons whose mouths spurt out water, relating to grotesque architecture’s best-known feature: gargoyles. (13)

After all, Bannkörbe are beehives, and therefore also functional; the mouth is the flight hole, the entrance of the hive through which the bees fly in and out. For the bees, it materially acts as a passage to the open; this passage, however, can also be closed, turning the hive into a trap. According to André Breton, what captivates us in magical artworks today is not their magic, which has worn out, but the enduring aesthetic beauty, even though this was often an accessory for their creators. (14) Bannkörbe, however, are more than art, and while the spellbinding effects may have faded, the function of housing bees remains.

Although beehives are commonly seen as the structural expression of a symbiotic human-bee relationship, they are also machines of control and can become deadly for bees. For some beekeepers, skep hives relate to barbaric practices involving killing bees with sulfur at the end of the summer to facilitate the harvest. (15) Moreover, it is believed that the organisms that live in these hives were trained to be more aggressive as a result of being constantly shaken by the beekeeper.

However, Bannkörbe were never intended to be a source of honey; their architecture, composed of a fragile mask at its core, does not seem to indicate any standard practices. Bee organisms that inhabited this hive, thereby, were not managed like other skeps, turning them into a refuge from intense and sometimes harmful practices. This particular aspect of Bannkörbe is a key example to understand how cultural beliefs can transform hive design and therefore create less destructive relationships with bees.

Whereas the human/bee relationship will never be symmetrical, there are alternative practices that produce the possibility of imagining other ways of living together. For example, Bannkörbe transforms skep hives into ornamental and magic hives, sparing bees from human intervention. (16) However, design alone won’t do the job. Bees and humans—or I should say bees—need us to keep experimenting and developing new designs and economies that center the bees’ well-being rather than production. To truly achieve a sustainable way of living together with bees, we need to imagine post-capitalist beekeeping practices, taking the form of a non-destructive approach to bees.

Notes

1. China Miéville, The Scar (London: Macmillan Publishers, 2002)
2. Thomas D. Seeley, Honeybee Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 43–44.
3. Skep beekeeping, also known as “swarm beekeeping,” is a particular practice of keeping bees in straw inverted baskets typical of central Europe with a strong tradition in northern Germany and especially in the Lüneburg Heath.
4. These people were key participants in this study on Bannkörbe.
5. Ellen Lapper and Aladin Borioli, “Hives 2400 B.C.E.–1852 C.E.,” in Hives 2400 B.C.E.–1852 C.E. (Paris: RVB Books, 2022 [2020]), 1.
6. Irmgard Jung-Hoffmann, “Bienenkörbe,” in Bienenbäume, Figurenstöcke und Bannkörbe (Berlin: Fördererkreis der naturwissenschaftlichen Museen Berlins e.V., 1993), 101.
7. Forest beekeeping is the practice of keeping bees within artificial habitats, closely mimicking wild bee nests. This practice was widespread in Europe from the Middle Ages to the mid-19th century, mostly in central Europe up to Russia, among Slavic, Baltic, and Finno-Ugric peoples. See Marian Jeliński, “Bienenbäume und Klotzbeuten im östlichen Mitteleuropa,” in Bienenbäume, Figurenstöcke und Bannkörbe, 15.
8. Irmgard Jung-Hoffmann, “Von der Klotzbeute zum Figurenstock,” in Bienenbäume, Figurenstöcke und Bannkörbe, 47.
9. Von Hermann Geffcken, “Bannkörbe,” in Bienenbäume, Figurenstöcke und Bannkörbe, 105.
10. Ibid.
11. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 84.
12. Wikipedia contributors, “Mascaron (architecture),” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, accessed September 21, 2023, https://en.wikipedia. org/w/index. php?title=Mascaron_ (architecture)&oldid=1176 159071
13. Dominique Cordelier, “Le mascaron au XVIe siècle, une ‘bizarrerie,’ in Masques mascarades mascarons (Paris: Louvre éditions, 2014), 147–49.
14. Ibid, 150.
15. André Breton, Formes de l’art: L’art magique (Paris: Club français de l’art,1957), 27.
16. Eva Crane, “The World’s Beekeeping—Past and Present,” in The Hive and the Honeybee,
    ed. R. A. Grout (Hamilton, IL: Dadant & Sons, 1975), 1–10.