Creating a buzz! This Czech student won an award for teaching bees how to throw shade

Eduard Seibert, a student at the University of Liberec, taught bees how to make honey-scented lampshades!

Tom Lane

Written by Tom Lane Published on 21.01.2021 14:19:00 (updated on 21.01.2021) Reading time: 2 minutes

A Czech student has picked up an award for his project, which teaching bees how to make lampshades.

Eduard Seibert used the natural abilities of bees and they only need the basic shape of a wax plate to create the designs and they continue on their own. The lampshades have proven powerful and even give off a delicate honey scent.

It all started with glass according to the University of Liberec student, "The original plan was to make a glass melt sculpture using lost wax technology, and I was thinking about how to create a wax model in 3D printing to suit me, and that got me to the bees," he told Aktualne.

Seibert first studied architecture in Liberec and then continued at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague, where he worked with glass. Seibert has been working on a bee project for five years.

Czech design week 2020 Kongresové centrum Praha 😍

Posted by Eduard on Thursday, 10 September 2020

For the Beehive project, he won the Preciosa Foundation Award and the CzechInvest Award in the competition for the Best Start-up of the Technical University of Liberec 2020.

"Bees can't learn, you have to adapt to what they can do. Understand how they think, how they build and not try to 'break' them, but help them where you want to get them," Seibert explained.

The bees get a prepared shape from a wax plate into the hive, the parts of which are glued together with beeswax. The bees thin the partition and complete the space with a thin and translucent mass, at the same time strengthening the honeycomb. The beekeeper must then remove it from the hive in time so that the bees do not carry too much honey into it.

"We still have a lot of testing to do. It depends, for example, on the place where you hang the honeycomb in the hive. Sometimes the bees ignore it. Bees are very productive, but we try not to harden or bother them," added the artist.

According to him, the price of one light should be around 8000 crowns. The project is also to help beekeepers, who will receive almost a fifth of the price. This year, Seibert plans to produce about a hundred Beehive lampshades.

See the full gallery below:

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