10,000 Waking Bees – EPFL Pavilions

10,000 Waking Bees is a glimpse inside a scientific investigation into the impact of anaesthetics on the circadian clock of honey bees. As an artist and a beekeeper, Anne Noble fell in love with chronobiologist Guy Warman’s studies of the time sense of bees. He found that general anaesthesia stops the circadian clock of honey bees so that their time orientation is out of synch when they navigate using the position of the sun in the sky. After six hours of anaesthesia their direction of flight back to the hive is that which they would have taken at the moment of being put to sleep, following the sun’s course six hours earlier.