Honeybees, Matthew Brandt's photography

As this dire ecological mystery was just coming into public awareness, I was confronted with the physical reality of a hive’s collective death in a surreal scenario. As a way of remembering this profound experience, I decided to walk along the beach and collect the carcass of each dead bee that I saw.

One year later I photographed these bees and made a print out of their bodies using an antiquated 19th century photographic process called gum-bichromate printing. As I made more of these prints, I began collecting bee carcasses from local Californian honey and bee farms. Throughout my time working on this project, I have not met a single beekeeper that hasn’t lost a significant number of hives in the past 5 years.

Witnessing a dying colony undoubtedly charged my own sense of mortality and, perhaps more generally, I believe creative drive stems from an anxiety of death. Honeybees pollinate our crops, and without them our lives would be much more difficult. Bees help us survive in a beautifully balanced symbiotic cycle, and now there is a rupture in this order. That day on the beach, I stood witness to this rupture. In a futile attempt to sustain order, I held on, literally, by collecting as many dead bees that I could find before their bodies drifted, disintegrated, and disappeared into the ocean.