【Digital】Hand-drawn Honey Bee (Apis sp.) Natural-History Art Print — Digital Download

Hand-drawn natural-history illustration, Honey Bee (Apis sp.), digital download (no physical item is shipped) I drew the honeybee the way a specimen is laid out in a cabinet drawer: from directly above, wings opened flat, legs set out in matching pairs. That symmetry is a convention of natural-history plates, and it has a practical reason. It is the only view in which all four wings, all six legs and the full banding of the abdomen can be read at once. The wings are where the drawing slowed down. A honeybee has two pairs, a large forewing and a smaller hindwing on each side, and in flight they are locked together by a row of minute hooks so that they beat as a single surface. Each wing is divided by veins into closed cells, and the pattern of those cells is one of the ways entomologists tell bee genera apart. I drew every vein and every cell, and let a faint amber tint sit in the membrane where the light catches it. The body is the opposite problem. The thorax is covered in dense, branched hair, golden at the edges and darker over the centre, and it is that hair that picks up pollen as the bee pushes through a flower. The abdomen is banded in black and gold, with a fringe of finer hair along each segment. Getting the hair to read as hair, rather than as a soft outline, meant building it up in short strokes, one direction at a time. Two large compound eyes wrap the sides of the head, and the antennae stand out ahead, the organs the bee uses to smell and to feel its way through the dark of the hive. Much of what we know about how bees communicate comes from Karl von Frisch, who decoded the waggle dance and shared the 1973 Nobel Prize for it. A returning forager runs a figure-of-eight on the comb. The angle of the straight run gives the direction of the flowers relative to the sun, and its length gives the distance. In the western honeybee a summer worker lives about five or six weeks and makes roughly a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey in that time, so a jar on a kitchen shelf is the work of hundreds of them. The plate names the genus, Apis sp., rather than a single species, and the genus is a small one. It holds the western honeybee, Apis mellifera, kept on farms almost everywhere; the eastern honeybee, Apis cerana, native across Asia; and the giant and dwarf honey bees of South and Southeast Asia. The western species is the one that ties this drawing most closely to Italy: its Italian subspecies, Apis mellifera ligustica, is among the most widely kept honey bees in the world, in hives from Taiwan and Japan to Thailand and North America. SPECIMEN NOTES - Scientific name: Apis sp., genus Apis, family Apidae; the plate is identified to genus - Common names: honey bee; ape (Italian), abeille (French), Honigbiene (German) - The genus: includes the western honeybee (A. mellifera), the eastern honeybee (A. cerana), the giant honey bee (A. dorsata) and the dwarf honey bee (A. florea) - The worker: a sterile female, roughly 7–15 mm long depending on species; each colony has a single queen - Pollen basket: the corbicula on each hind leg, a smooth concave plate fringed with hairs, carries packed pollen back to the hive - Eyes: two compound eyes plus three ocelli on the crown of the head - Wing venation: closed cells in each forewing, including the long marginal cell typical of the genus Apis - Wings: two pairs, joined in flight by a row of tiny hooks (hamuli) along the leading edge of the hind wing - Sting: barbed in workers, so it usually stays in the skin of mammals; the queen's sting is smooth - Communication: the waggle dance, decoded by Karl von Frisch (Nobel Prize, 1973), signals the direction and distance of food - Output: in the western honeybee, a summer worker lives about 5–6 weeks and produces roughly one-twelfth of a teaspoon of honey - Italian honeybee: Apis mellifera ligustica, the western honeybee's subspecies native to the Italian peninsula, is among the most widely kept honey bees in the world - Role: a major managed pollinator of fruit, nut and vegetable crops ON THE WALL, OR AS A GIFT The honeybee belongs in a kitchen or pantry, near the honey jar and the fruit prints, where it quietly explains where much of the food on the table came from. It also suits a study or a naturalist wall alongside beetles and butterflies, framed in natural oak or a warm brass-toned metal that echoes the amber of the body. Hung beside the bumblebee plate, it makes a two-print study of wild and kept bees. As a gift it suits a beekeeper, a gardener, a teacher on Teacher's Day, or a friend who has just moved into a home with a garden.