About

For American University’s HIST 730:  Public History Practicum, we created a pop-up exhibit about the history of honey bees.  Entitled Buzzzzzing Through Time, this exhibit was designed with the Smithsonian Gardens for display at Garden Fest on May 8, 2015 from 10 am-3 pm.

To fit within the scope of this year’s Garden Fest theme – pollinators – the Smithsonian Gardens asked us to build a pop-up exhibit about the history of honey bees.  Our supervisor, Cynthia Brown, entrusted us with great flexibility, letting us decide what aspects of this history to focus on and what direction to take.  Initially, our research focused on determining the origins of honey bees and when and why they came to the United States.  However, quickly, we realized there was a story in all the ways humans rely on these insects.  Much of the current literature written about honey bees centers on their potential extinction.  While this is an extremely important message to spread, we did not want it to be the main component of our exhibit.  Instead, we decided that if we could demonstrate that people have depended on honey bees for thousands of years, we can better stress the necessity of saving them.

After much research, we saw the value in highlighting human reliance on honey bees and chose to illustrate this reliance through a timeline.  Consequently, we changed the title from a simple “Honey Bee History” to “Buzzzzzing Through Time” and crafted our big idea as:  “Humans have long relied on honey bees for their production of honey and wax.”  It is a very simple concept because the people who attend Garden Fest vary from professionals and scientists to young children, and ideally, anyone can grasp this big idea.

This exhibit was curated by Alexandra Erichson, Anna Reiter, and Anna Snyder.