Beeism is a project that combines data visualization with the power of creative coding. Using processing and Javascript libraries, beehive activity during different periods in the year in areas of Pennsylvania was visualized. This project was done as an exploratory case study to create a visualization that makes the unseen beauties of nature visible.
Functioning as a “superorganism”, a honey bee colony can contain thousands of individuals whose intricate behavior results from a shared genetic background and sophisticated social signals conveyed through multiple communication channels. (Bozek et al. 2021: 123); Vital natural processes that affect the environment are oftentimes not visible to the naked human eye.
With the catastrophic effects of climate change looming closer, it becomes essential to visualize the unique processes of the natural environment to understand the needs of this complex ecosystem.
This project attempts to study the change in beehive activity at different periods of the year by visually translating it into a format that can be universally understood. Since this data set is particularly complex and nuanced, it is important to communicate this information with both integrity and precision, without losing the beauty of this intrinsic process.
The activity within a beehive is complex. The effect of these dynamics is to cooperatively divide and organize the effort necessary to maintain a well-functioning collective in response to external and internal environmental change, thus enabling the colony to grow and reproduce. (Bozek et al. 2021); To be able to capture the beauty of this process with credible data sources, a number of steps were required, outlined below.
The first step in this process was to collect data. For this project, data was sourced from the Center of Pollinator Research, Penn State University [Funding by a USDA-NIFA-AFRI (#2018-67013-27538) to C.M. Grozinger.] This data has information pertaining to locations of different beehives in Pennsylvania, weight changes and the time of the recorded weight change. Parsing through this data, information related to specific hives could be categorized to study the trend of weight changes in bee hives through the year. Data collected between June 14th, 2018 to November 28th, 2018 was used. This documented a year’s worth of activity in one specific beehive in Pennsylvania.
Once data was curated, the hive activity needed to be shown through a particle system. This decision was made based on the nature of the beehive in which multiple unique particles work together in a system. In order to visualize this complex process with actual data points, this project was done using P5.js, a JavaScript library for creative coding.
With this information, the particle system was coded in JavaScript to display the changing data. With weight changes, particles get added to the overall structure, thus creating a visual representation of the changes in the density of the system. As time passes, the number of particles increases and decreases, showing the general trend of the activity in the hive over a period of a year. Particles used a number of parameters including acceleration, velocity and gravity in order to emulate the organic nature of this process.
It was important to be able to relate the data projected to different parts of the year. This makes sense of the relationship between climatic differences and its effects on bee hive activity. For this, a temperature bar was added with color changes corresponding to different seasons of the year.
In the final outcome, data is translated to a moving and changing visualization that informs the viewer on differences in bee hive activity through the year. The visualization encapsulates a year’s worth of complex data which would otherwise be hard to understand for the general public. It hopes to bridge people closer to understanding natural processes thereby building a connection with the earth.
Community Engagement with the earth.
The visualization provides opportunities for the quantitative study of collective bee behavior at a level that can be absorbed and understood by a general audience. This visualization takes one step forward to continue to build and nurture our relationship with the natural environment.
