Salt Tree Art Presents
The Fall Festoon
A Celebration of the Honey Bee
Salt Tree Art’s Fall Festoon was presented as a live event on October 17, 2020. You can continue to explore this event page for recordings of the live broadcast discussions, activities, and art all about the honey bee and other pollinators!
You can view the short orientation video for general event information, or use these buttons to navigate to specific event features.
What is a bee festoon? Honey bees will work together in linking their legs, forming a chain in the hive that crosses distances wider than a single bee. Festoons are believed to help bees form scaffolding for construction of the hive comb, though another theory believes festooning helps to measure distances in the design of the comb.
Join Our Discussions
Community Conversations
Recordings of our live broadcast discussions are available for viewing below, as well as information on the featured speakers.
City Bees
The Present and Future of Urban Beekeeping
Featured Panelists
Nicole has had a longtime fascination with bees, and after taking a beekeeping course at Rutgers University she began assisting their Agriculture Department with their hives. As a black woman of Puerto Rican descent, she recognized the importance of representation in beekeeping, and became a honey bee educator to expose young People of Color to beekeeping as a professional pursuit. In addition to beekeeping, her company, Bees on Main St., provides a full range of services to Philadelphia and southern New Jersey, including hive installation and consultation, beekeeping training, swarm rescues, and honey harvesting.
Nick is an emerging authority in urban beekeeping and shares his passion through classes and events dedicated to honey bees and pollinators, as well as online through several social channels. His own bee farm, Astor Apiaries, is one of the leading apiaries in the NYC area. Nick recently received his Master Beekeeper Certification from Cornell University.
Mike Hollis, Services for the UnderServed
Mike is the Urban Farms Director at Services for the UnderServed, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting individuals with disabilities throughout NYC. Since 2014, Mike has coordinated a beekeeping project that teaches beekeeping to adults with developmental disabilities, with hives at supportive housing residences in Brooklyn and the Bronx. The initiative has also supported entrepreneurial initiatives with participants selling honey at NYC farmers’ markets, and creating added-value products with infused honeys and beeswax creations.
Bees as Collaborators for Art and Science
Featured Panelists
In her first year of college, Jessie found a book about ancient funeral portraits that were painted with beeswax. She became fascinated by this lost art and has dedicated herself to working with beeswax encaustic pigments for the past 16 years. She is a working artist, an art fair exhibitor, an encaustic workshop instructor, and a pollinator protection advocate who is the creative mind behind, Buzz in Art Studios in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Jessie is also a member of Gallery Q: Artists Cooperative, is Council Chair for the Stevens Point Festival of the Arts, and is on the steering committee for the Hidden Studios Art Tour in Central Wisconsin.
Dr. Elizabeth Hénaff is a computational biologist with an art practice. She currently holds an Assistant Professor position in the Technology, Culture and Society department at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering in New York City.
At the center of her work is a fascination with the way living beings interact with their environment. This inquiry has produced a body of work that ranges from scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals, to projects with landscape architects, to working as an artist in environments from the School of Visual Arts to the MIT Media Lab. She has made contributions to understanding how plants respond to the force of gravity, how genome structure changes in response to stress, and most recently has turned her attention to the ubiquitous and invisible microbial component of our environment. Her work with the MIT Media Lab led to the development of a novel approach to urban microbiome sampling using honeybees.
Brian is a NYC-based environmental artist who finds inspiration in the regenerative design movement, building creative pathways for healing ecosystems through community engagement. He serves as a principal artist for Salt Tree Art. His recent work includes an experimental sculptural series, Myco-Rise, which explored artistic techniques for improving regional mushroom farming practices, and Wind & Waves, a biodegradable sculpture for LaGuardia Airport that embedded seeds from plants connected to NYC’s immigration history.
One of his current projects, Sticky Situations, works with honey bees to assist in the artistic process, with the pilot sculpture from the series, Comb Over, exhibiting last year.
Stingless Bees and Log Hives
Exploring Unique Honey-Cultivation Practices
Featured Speakers
Tobias the founder and director of Bee Aware Brisbane in Australia. He is a native bee researcher and commercial stingless bee keeper with a passion for community engagement and science communication. Since 2010 Toby has been presenting lectures and workshops to community groups on native bees and pollination, from kindergarteners to adults, including 12 years of experience teaching University students, on topics including ecology, entomology, pollination, and bee identification. Toby’s research background is in understanding native bee communities in agricultural landscapes, the use of native bees in crop pollination, and native bee biology and ecology. Toby’s current research is focused on stingless bee biology and the use of native bees in glasshouse/protected pollination (as well as open field crops). Toby’s work time is divided among native stingless bee keeping, teaching on beekeeping and bee conservation to school children and adults (through Bee Aware Kids), university teaching, and bee and pollination research (at the University of Queensland). Five years ago, Toby’s stingless bee keeping ‘hobby’ morphed into something more serious, and he has been managing native stingless bees commercially since. In the last five years Toby has propagated over 1000 new stingless bee hives, and manages hives throughout eastern Australia.
Toby has recently written a book on the identification of Australian bees, targeted at university students and researchers: The Australian Bee Genera
Fredrick is the CEO of the Apiculture Platform of Kenya, which since 2016 has promoted the study of conservation of bees and other pollinators as an approach to improved food and nutritional security, and improved livelihoods for socioeconomic development.
APK seeks to develop the science and art of beekeeping in Kenya for food security through pollination, enterprise promotion, and environmental conservation, including building the Kenya apiculture industry, developing best practice and quality standards for the sector, and advancing public policies that promote bee health and apiculture markets.
Celebrate From Home
Digital Festival
You can explore our digital festival activities below. Participate in pollinator-themed make-along projects, check out our online art gallery, and join a waggle dance!
Share your creations, your art, and your dance moves with us! Use the hashtags #FallFestoon and @SaltTreeArt on social media so we can highlight your work!
Get Creative!
Make-Along Projects
Building a Pollinator Hydration Station
with Lauren Ullrich
Building a Mason Bee House
with Matt, Kristen, & Sienna Hollis
Building a Bee Ring Puppet
with Brian Soliwoda
For more pollinator-themed activities, check out Salt Tree Art’s environmental learning resource page. Our module on Bees & Other Pollinators includes a variety of educational exercises for learners of all ages.
Be Inspired!
Pollinator Art Gallery
In Praise of Bees
A crankie performance of a centuries old English poem, In a Beekeeper’s Garden. Work by Sue Truman of the Crankie Factory.
Bumble Bee
The Margaret Wise Brown poem Bumble Bee set to an original musical composition by Sandy Buchner (Zelda Starfire), with video of Kansas bees in Sandy’s family’s pasture, and shadow puppets to accompany.
Join Our Dance Party
Waggle It!
Participatory Dancing with Lauren Alzos
Project Partnerships and Supporters
This event was made possible in part by the Queens Council on the Arts with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
With Additional Support From
