Hives: A Visual History of the Beehive

by Aladin Borioli, Ellen Lapper

Since the birth of the modern beehive in 1852, structural innovation in hive construction has entered a dormant period. By favouring the standardised box hive, beekeeping turns its back on 4,400 years of architectural diversity. This little book focuses on that period of history prior to homogenisation, drawing from as far back as 2400 BCE. By rejecting a fixed narrative, linearity makes way for polymorphism, introducing graphic design, photography and writing to retell the story of beehives. The 375 images offer a glimpse into this proliferous history of architecture for non-humans.

This book is a fragment of an ongoing and open-ended research project titled “Apian” which uses theoretical, iconographic and ethnographic methods to research on the relationship between bees and humans.

Parallel text in French and English.

Genres: Nonfiction

448 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2020

Reviews

[Nick Guimaraes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went in on this book based off of the look and the curious images inside. It was not until I got about 10 pages in did I realize that it was 400+ pages of different types of man-made bee hives throughout history. Not what I expected but it was honestly fascinating. There were so many different molds for the hives, some in sculpted after brutalist architecture, some in the shape of lions and dragons. I really had no idea how many different ways to make hives besides a plain box. The layouts for the pages were really well done and visually appealing, giving me a lot of design inspiration, which is more or less why I bought the book. Really cool, definitely recommend if you are enjoy photographic history and niche topics.