If not by hand is a mobile laboratory run by Dr. Mitchell Akiyama and Dr. Brock Harpur. The lab is dedicated to the production of artificial honey. Stresses suffered by global honeybee populations are well documented. The collapse of honeybee colonies would be devastating for food production that relies on pollination, but, evidently, it would also eliminate honey production. As strategy against such an outcome, it is crucial that researchers develop alternative techniques for the production of honey.
Curator's statement:
The 49 McCaul kitchenette has become a lab for the bee-less, human production of honey—the study of which is called ‘melliferology’. With bees dying in droves,[1] this emerging field of study holds the promise of a world where human work can replace bee labour, or, at the very least, relieve some of the pressure on bee colonies to sustain the production of honey.
In late 2006, a group of scientists with members from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Pennsylvania State University, and the Florida Department of Agriculture recorded “unprecedented” losses in US honey bee populations from October–December 2006. That December, they released a report on the phenomenon, tentatively naming it the ‘Fall Dwindle Disease’ and laying out possible causes for it such as pesticide contamination (especially that caused by neonicotinoids, which late gained significant attention from the masses), digestive tract abnormalities, and fungal pathogen strains. Later revisions saw the renaming of the phenomenon to ‘Colony Collapse Disorder’ (CCD), a term that stuck and became the central focus of the working group. Soon afterward, the news broke that honeybees were vanishing.[2] This impending sense of bee extinction took on more and more of an urgent edge as scientists and reporters linked it to food insecurity risks and implied its connection to a coming human extinction.
Unsurprisingly, the crisis proceeded to achieve meme status, with corporations, news platforms, and social media sites rushing to cover the plight of the small but influential honeybee, and its extinction’s implications for the human condition. Meanwhile, several scientists and scientific journalists have criticized this wave of popular interest as sensationalizing and unnuanced, pointing out how the overall population of honeybees in the US, Canada and Europe has actually stayed steady or increased slightly since the widespread adoption of neonics in the 1990s.[3] These back and forth dialogues between stakeholders of bee life have incited controversy, bringing forward questions of who to trust (who is an expert) as well as what does or does not constitute a crisis.
Taking the bee crisis conversation as a point of departure, Akiyama explores the intellectualization and fetishization of animal life. He adopts the persona of a scientist who misguidedly attempts to deal with the threat of honey bee extinction with the solution of human honey production, and poses the question of how one might respond to an ecological crisis that may or may not happen.
[1] Dennis vanEngelsdorp et al.,“Fall-Dwindle Disease”: Investigations into the causes of sudden and alarming colony losses experienced by beekeepers in the fall of 2006. (Preliminary Report: First Revision), Florida Department of Agriculture, 2006–7, https://www.apiservices.biz/en/articles/sort-by-popularity/492-colony-collapse-disorder-ccd.
[2] Randal R. Rucker and Walter N. Thurman, “Colony Collapse Disorder: The Market Response to Bee Disease”, PERC Policy Series, no. 50, edited by Roger Meiners, https://www.perc.org/wp-content/uploads/old/ps50.pdf.
[3] Jon Entine, “The Bee Apocalypse Was Never Real; Here’s Why,” American Council on Science and Health, 17 April 2018, https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/04/17/bee-apocalypse-was-never-real-heres-why-12851.
- Belinda Kwan