BUZZING FORWARD
RESEARCH
BUZZING FORWARD
EXPERIMENTS
ABOUT US
HIVE
BUZZING FORWARD
Where do we go from here?
- This thought experiment aims to educate and engage people, deepening their connection to nature and inspiring cohesive, interdependent collaboration, much like bees.
- Bees don't think about collaboration, they simply live it. This project asks what it would look like if humans did the same.
- This project beyond our test evolves into the Propolis game, which brings our experiments to a wider audience.
- This game combines the experience of creating propolis and working in a hive without the social and biological disadvantages of being human.
- In this game, players maintain propolis ratios of a collective hive while acting as foragers, worker bees, and defenders throughout the span of a year. The end goal of the game is to take your colony successfully through a year to ensure sustainability throughout winter.
- The goal is not just to make a fun activity for participants, but to feel what it means to be part of a system larger than yourself, and carry that feeling beyond the play experience.
Experiment Findings
The experiment highlights that while humans can approximate propolis through the combination of collected materials and bodily contribution, the process is notably inefficient.
Unlike bee colonies where production is cohesive, stable, and tolerant, human attempts were slowed by both biological limitations and the disadvantages of individualistic labor.
This gap apparent by material studies exposes how the human ego,when expressed through individual ownership, discomfort with biological processes, and participation motivation, disrupts collective efficiency.
“Human-made” propolis is hindered by apparent physical boundaries and underlying social boundaries. Our experiment deconstructs the idea of the autonomous individual revealing that resilience depends not on isolated efforts, but systems of cooperation.
Our Human-Bee Simulation tested what happens when humans try to behave like a hive. Participants were assigned specialized roles that mirrored the division of labor within a colony.
This study creates a “speculative material” inspired by propolis by structuring interactions around coordinated tasked. The simulation showed how the definition of roles and motivated group participation amplified more efficient and organized production.
Unlike, real bee systems, efficiency is still disrupted by individual decision-making and varying levels of engagement. This breakdown reveals that while collective intelligence can be approximated through structured systems, it is not automatic in human systems.
Mapping not only visualizes how collective labor outperforms individualism, but also exposes the social and cognitive frictions that distinguish human motivation from that of a bee colony.
Reflections
While propolis is a material that repairs hives, provides immunity to both bees and humans, and acts as a living archive of the environmental condition in which it exists, it can also be viewed as a process itself.
It is possible for humans to replicate a version of an bio-product, but the current human condition does not allow use to replicate ecological systems.
Rather than treating these breakdowns as failures, it can be read as a thought experiment.
The “inefficiency” of human propolis becomes a tool that reveals that conditions under which collective intelligence can emerge or collapse.
How should humans re-frame their worldy perspective going forward?
HOW CAN PROPOLIS ACT AS A LENS FOR THINKING ACROSS SPECIES AND SYSTEMS?
IF PROPOLIS IS THE PRODUCT OF COLLECTIVE REPAIR, WHAT DOES IT MEAN WHEN HUMAN SYSTEMS RESIST SHARED MATERIAL AND CONTRIBUTION?
WHAT WOULD HUMAN SYSTEMS LOOK LIKE IF THEY PRIORITIZED RELATION STRUCTURE OVER INDIVIDUALIZED AUTONOMY?
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