Queen honeybee mezzotint engraving by Andrew Tyzack. Now available framed and matted. A limited edition of 60 printed on Hahnemühle acid free paper.

New in Bees in Art: Honeybee tryptich: Drone: Queen: Worker. An open edition print by renowned insect artist Richard Lewington. Signed in pencil.

We are delighted to announce that photographer and artist Rick Lieder has joined Bees in Art. Rick has supplied Bees in Art with signed, limited edition, archival pigment print photographs.

Rick possess a gentle painterly eye and photographs honeybees, using the warmth of natural light: at work, within the hive and in flight. Without the usual armament of tripod and flash, Rick quietly gets in amongst the bees. Accepted, he is able to photograph them from their perspective.

Rick’s clients include: Natural History Magazine; HarperCollins; Penguin Publishing and Orion Magazine.

Honeybees in flight by Rick Lieder

A small derelict church becomes an apiary for honeybees on the North York Moors.

A wood engraving begins with a rough boxwood round, which is cut ‘end grain’ on and polished until it is smoother than glass. The artist engraves onto the darkened surface with various tools. The final print is pulled from the inked engraving, using a fine quality paper.



A Queen Honeybee by Andrew Tyzack: From boxwood round to finished wood engraving.

A new drawing and a new limited edition wood engraving of queen honeybees by Andrew Tyzack.

‘Honeybee queen’, pencil on paper, & ‘Queen honeybee’, wood engraving by Andrew Tyzack

In 1985 Kit Williams broke open a seal upon the mahogany bee-box (see title page) to reveal the title of his book. Readers were given one year after publishing to solve the book’s hidden clues and win the golden queen bee.

The Fables of Aesop: The Bee and Jupiter. Written by Maurice Maeterlinck and illustrated by E.J. Detmold 1909

A brand new pencil drawing of honeybees by Andrew Tyzack. This drawing features the three ‘castes’ of bees found in a honeybee colony: the queen, the drones and the workers.

Honeybees by Andrew Tyzack

Available soon at Bees in Art are a queen honeybee, drone honeybee and worker honeybee open edition prints by Richard Lewington. Each signed by Richard Lewington in pencil.

Richard Lewington has provided Bees in Art with open edition prints of a hornet, honeybees with swarm and bumblebees which can now be purchased. Richard lives and works in Oxfordshire, UK, and is one of Europe's foremost natural history illustrators. Among Richard's achievements are the illustrations for the 'Field Guide to the Moths of Great Britain and Ireland', which includes 1,700 immaculate paintings of British moths. A publication remarkable for presenting each moth in its natural posture as it is seen in the field, at rest with wings folded.

Latterly Richard has written and illustrated the ‘Pocket Guide to the Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland’, which shows the detailed life-cycles of all the British butterflies, and with his artist brother Ian, who illustrated the birds, the ‘Guide to Garden Wildlife’, which includes 900 illustrations of 500 species, including the ‘big six’ British bumblebees, found in British gardens.

Bombus terrestris by Richard Lewington

Debbie Grice, co-founder of Bees in Art, is an award winning artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art. Married to Andrew Tyzack she is the ‘beekeepers wife’, jarring honey and creating beautiful labels for the honey jars. Winner of the Folio Society Illustration Award 1998, Debbie produces evocative mezzotint engravings of apiaries. She is also a qualified pilot and is featured in a Wellcome Trust Community TV production.

Beehives by Wood Mezzotint Engraving by Debbie Grice

To help reverse the worrying decline in the UK bee population, The Co-operative has launched Plan Bee, a 10 point plan that includes action on pesticides, actions on farms, funding research and inspiring individuals to make a difference. Vanishing of the Bees can be viewed throughout the UK. Click here for screenings.

Andrew Tyzack is now preparing his bees for winter. The bees can store up to 20kg/50Ib of sugar syrup in the brood chamber. Now that the queen honeybee’s egg laying is much reduced, the empty brood cells provide plenty of storage room. The syrup is given to the bees with the use of a feeder, they collect and take the syrup down into the brood chamber and cap it with beeswax. During the cold winter months the bees cluster together and shiver their flight muscles to generate warmth. They consume the syrup to fuel this shivering.

Feeding honeybees with sugar syrup

Lastly a mouse guard is attached over the hive entrance. This prevents mice from entering the bee hive and constructing a nest alongside the bees. During the winter mice can eat their way through the stored syrup, beeswax combs and even the wintering bees.

Attaching a mouse guard to a British Modified National Bee Hive

The bees are then left alone until December, when they will be trickled with a dilute solution of oxalic acid. Which is a required procedure to reduce the numbers of Varroa Destructor Mites (Varroa jacobsoni), now endemic in Britain. Many scientists suspect Varroa as one of the causes of the mysterious Colony Collapse Disorder.

Heather Honeycomb produced by Andrew Tyzack’s bees.

Sunset, North York Moors, September 2009

Andrew Tyzack has collected his honeybees from the North York Moors, returning them to his home apiary in East Yorkshire. At sunset the bees returned to the hives allowing the entrances to be closed. They were sufficiently heavy to make the thirty metres to the car quite a struggle. Suggesting that this year the bees have produced a decent crop of heather honey. Excellent crops from the moors only come once in every five years. Andrew will now begin the process of harvesting the honey from the hives.

Bees and Heather Honey

Sunrise and Beehives, North York Moors, August 2009

Bees in Art artist and curator Andrew Tyzack has taken his honey bees to the North York Moors, with the hope that they gather heather honey. Soon the ling heather (Calluna vulgaris) will be in full bloom, turning the moors into a panorama of beautiful violet. Andrew is a third generation beekeeper and every August he takes his beehives up to the moors. Weather permitting, his bees will fill the supers with honey. In September he'll bring the hives back to his home apiary to harvest the honey. Then he will feed and prepare his bees for winter.