If you’ve ever relaxed with a glass of whiskey in the evening, a swarm of 80,000 buzzing, stinging bees may have been the furthest thing from your mind.
But the Dewar’s scotch whiskey company combined those two disparate ideas when they teamed up with The Ebeling Group and the Sid Lee team for an advertising project promoting the company’s Highlander Honey brand. Beekeeper Robin Theron and Los Angeles sculptor and engineer James Peterson worked together to get an enormous swarm of bees to sculpt a bottle and a bust of a man’s head out of honeycomb.
To create the sculpture, Theron put the bees inside a plastic shell of Peterson’s design. Enclosed in this tightly fitting shell was a sculpture that the bees built an inside-out hive around. The outer shell was removed, leaving a sculpture in honeycomb. People could watch the bees’ progress on a feed linked from Dewar’s Facebook page. Peterson called the experience “humbling” and went on to say, “It’s beautiful to see these creatures inhabit this object that I had a hand in,” in the video below.
The project was widely reported by various advertising and design blogs, but it was not without controversy. Dezeen Magazine reported in July that artist Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny, who made vases out of bees’ wax in 2007 and 2010, said that the ad campaign “unabashedly exploits the poetry” of his own work. Dezeen reported that Sid Lee admitted that the project was inspired by the earlier work, but the campaign used a slightly different process to sculpt its own wax forms. Sid Lee’s managing partner Lukas Derksen said that their project used molds to hold the bees in order to create a more-precise sculpture.
Above image: If a swarm of bees doesn’t put you in a drinking mood, Dewar’s hopes its advertising campaign for honey scotch whiskey will change your mind. Photograph courtesy of The Ebeling Group.
Beekeeper Robin Theron, who collaborated on the project. All images courtesy of The Ebeling Group.
Beekeeper Robin Theron, who collaborated on the project. All images courtesy of The Ebeling Group.
Beekeeper Robin Theron and Los Angeles sculptor and engineer James Peterson explain their “3B Printing Project,” an ad campaign for Dewar’s Highlander Honey whiskey, which used 80,000 bees to build sculptures out of honeycomb. Video by Dewar’s.
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