RATIO; Life through Bees Eyes

After a long and really cold Winter, we finally reached Spring with its beautiful sunny days and its wonderful and colourful flowers, that are celebrated with the famous Chelsea Flower Show every year. This year, we are going to have a lovely surprise with the collaboration of the Royal Horticultural Society and the luxury flower brand McQueens flowers. For this edition of the Chelsea Flower Show, McQueens will transport us into the world of bees, and make us see the world through their eyes. More than just a funny moment, it is also a huge move to raise awareness about the decline of the bees population.

McQueens is well known worldwide for its amazing floral designs that could be seen in a lot of prestigious events such as the Vanity Fair’s Oscars After Party, the All England Lawn Tennis Club’s Wimbledon Champion’s Ball and the London Evening Standard Theatre Awards. In addition to its amazing flowers, the luxury brand also has schools in London, New York, and Seoul. This is an evidence of the beauty of British flowers.

For the Chelsea Flower Show, McQueens created two original art installations with seeing the world through bees eyes as the main theme. These amazing designs needed more than 20 workers working for over five days, 2,500 plants, 6,000 Craspedia stems, and 6,000 leaves to be brought to life and because you need to know about the bees perfectly to show the people the world through their eyes, McQueens also collaborated with Dr. David Lawson, a bee behaviourist at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Bristol.

The first installation, sweetly called “Honey, I’m home!” is an interactive installation looking like a giant igloo-like hexagonal honeycomb. With this incredible installation, visitors will be guided by the McQueens flower school into the hive and create a swarm of 3D honey bees because it is a responsible and ethical installation made to raise awareness about the bees and nature, bees creators will make them out of dried leaves, wood and Craspedia flowers that they will find in the hive. More than a simple creative activity, “Honey, I’m home!” also aims to open people’s eyes about how important bees are when it comes to pollination and keeping plants alive. This activity sounds so fun and really a nice way to teach children, and even adults about how to put themselves in the place of the bees, or even in the place of someone else, and to adapt their behaviour following that. With “Honey, I’m home!”, McQueens hope to have at least 2,000 bees created under the hive by the end of the Chelsea Flower Show. With such a nice installation, there is no doubt that they will succeed!

The second installation is a giant 20m long by a 7m immersive tunnel with a lovely upside-down lavender field called Per Oculus Apum (it means “Through the Eyes of Bees). With this really impressive and colourful installation, visitors will be invited to see the world through the bees eyes, and especially to see flowers in ultraviolet, the same way bees do. All the flowers used to make this giant installation are organic, bee-friendly and eye-catching (visitors will see yellow, blue, violet, only vibrant and wonderful colours), to make everything even more breathtaking, the flowers will form a giant wave coming from the ceiling, curving and majestically falling on the floor. This installation will make you have a lovely walk with the sound of the electrostatic patters that help bees find flowers and sweet and gourmand honey scents, especially provided by London perfumer Miller Harris for this installation. With Per Oculus Apum, you will leave your body and life and be totally immersed into bees lives. Being turned into a bee, you will feel the same wonders as they do every day and realise how important they are for us and the planet. What a nice way to learn!

If you are a bees lover, or also if you want to learn more about these little warriors, the installations will be at the Chelsea Flower Show will be held from the 21st to the 25th of May. If every school gave us a lovely ecological lesson the same way as McQueens Flowers do, everyone would definitely love school.

If you want to know more about McQueens Flowers, here is the link to their website :mcqueens.co.uk/

To find all the information about the Chelsea Flower Show, here is the link to the page of the event on the RHS website  www.rhs.org.uk/shows-events/rhs-chelsea-flower-show