On Thursday, July 24, the Volcano Art Center will host a unique art/science presentation about native Hawaiian bees.
On Thursday, July 24, the Volcano Art Center will host a unique art/science presentation about native Hawaiian bees.
These largely overlooked bees are vital pollinators of native Hawaiian plants, and they have been vanishing with little notice.
The Hylaeus Project experiments with some creative ways of getting the word out about this imperiled and fantastic species. For this event, entomologist and drummer Lisa Schonberg will present audio and images gathered as part of the project. The presentation begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Great Room at VAC’s Niaulani Campus. Suggested donation to benefit VAC is $5.
Last summer, Schonberg and artist Aidan Koch spent a month in Hawaii documenting the Hawaiian Hylaeus through visual art, natural history writing, field recording and music composition based on soundscapes of the habitat sites they visited.
They traversed present and former Hylaeus habitat to find the bees. They visited sites on the Big Island, Kauai and Oahu. Their work has been compiled in an illustrated book called “The Hylaeus Project” and a set of music compositions for Secret Drum Band. The book includes interviews with Hawaiian naturalists, as well as watercolor plates and chapters about each field site they visited.
Schonberg looks forward to engaging the Hawaii Island community in a conversation about the Hylaeus bees.