To use a beelining box, one must follow the light. Choose an open sunny field for your location around plants that are in bloom with the season’s honey flow. Responding to your site and making use of the materials on hand, you perform rituals to beckon the bees towards your bee box. This could be any number of things including: waving a flag soaked in anise, boiling honey, singing to them, or even peeing in a bucket of corn cobs and dirt. Then wait for the sound of a buzzing honeybee or a glimpse of sunlight to catch on her wings.

The bee box is separated into two compartments so that you can move the honeybee to another room while you fill the honeycomb with sweet water, using the eyedropper. By closing and opening windows, one side becomes dark, while the other is filled with light. When I first realized that the bee box had to be light proof, the similarities between bee-lining boxes and pinhole cameras became evident – handheld, hand-made, light-tight objects.

Transforming the beelining box into a pinhole camera consisted of replacing the back wall with a film plate and drilling a tiny hole into the front wall to become an aperture. While the honeybee gathers, I open the lens cover so that the landscape that I found her in will be projected onto the back wall, along with her silhouette, the ghost of a honeybee.

all images were made in collaboration with the model and shared here with explicit consent

silver gelatin photograms