STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The Sun Valley Center for the Arts is buzzing with activity much like—ahem—a bee hive, as artists and volunteers alike work towards Friday’s opening of “Bees.”

More than 200 volunteers have contributed their time since Sunday, cutting thousands of paper bees from homemade paper embedded with Lewis flax seeds.

And like workers in a colony, each has their own task—none more important than another.

On Wednesday Kristin Poole cutouts of bees out of seed paper while another woman stuck them with pins. Elizabeth Jeffrey and Rob Lonning joined several others, hammering the cutouts onto birch plywood designed by computer to resemble a bumblebee nest.

And the artist--Dr. Cameron Cartiere—went around to each pulling at their wings with pliers to get a 3-D look.

“We always think of bee hives when we think of bees. But western bumblebees’ nests are more like popcorn balls,” said Cartiere, an associate professor in the faculty of Culture + Community at Vancouver, B.C.’s Emily Carr University of Art & Design who specializes in public art, urban renewal and sculpture parks.

Cartiere, author of “RE/Placing Public Art,” is one of five artists taking part in The Center’s BIG IDEA project “Bees,” which will kick off with an opening celebration at 5 p.m. Friday, April 13. Artists will offer a brief talk about their work, which will be up through June 22, at 6 p.m.

Cartier will also talk about her project at 5:30 p.m. tonight in a free lecture titled “Border Free Bees” at The Center, Fifth and Washington streets in Ketchum.

Cartiere’s installation, which she conceived with Nancy Holmes, associate professor at the University of British Columbia, plays off of projects she created earlier in the cities of Kelowna in British Columbia’s  Okanagan Valley and Richmond in the Vancouver, B.C. area.

In June she will be back to lay a 25-by-250-foot pollinator pasture quilt made of sheets of seed paper in The Center’s lot across from the Ketchum Post Office. That project will also involve planting other pollinator starts and seeds.

“We’re laying a quilt for the earth. The idea is to engage communities in rectifying habitat loss by transforming underutilized sites into native pollinator pastures,” she said.

“I’m excited, as it’s one of the most amazing exhibitions we’ve ever had,” said Kristin Poole, artistic director for The Center. “Four of the five artists are here creating installations. And we’ve had at least 200 people come in to help—60 yesterday alone. In June when we lay the quilt, we’re hoping for the right combination of rain and sunshine.”

Cartiere’s Border Free Bees project had its genesis in 1997 when she created an exhibition in San Francisco’s Marin County focusing on environmental issues. Her ears perked up as she heard a beekeeper lament how his hives were dying.

Between April 2015 and April 2016 American beekeepers lost 44 percent of their colonies.

Three key factors seem to be contributing to their demise: disease and parasites pesticide use and loss of habitat, said Cartiere. In the case of the western bumblebee, which she chose to focus on for this project, a fungal pathogen known as Nosema bombi could be a culprit.

Other pollinators, such as wasp, flies, birds, bats and butterflies, are also being affected.

“In British Columbia alone there are more than 450 species of wild bees that work as pollinators. We have 20,000 species of bees on the planet but we always seem to focus on the honey bee,” said Cartiere.

She chose the western bumblebee, also known as Bombus occidentalis, she added, because it’s found in Ketchum, as well as western Canada.

The western bumblebee is able to fly in cooler temperatures and at lower light levels than many bees. They often perform a behavior called buzz pollination in which they grab the pollen-producing part of the flower in their jaws and vibrate their wings, dislodging pollen that would have remained trapped.

The western bumblebee is responsible for pollinating greenhouse tomatoes, peppers  and cranberries, as well as alfalfa, avocado, apples, cherries and blackberries. But, while once common in the western United States and western Canada, it began declining in 1998 and has since has nearly disappeared.

“Our diet would be quite boring if we did not have pollinators,” said Cartiere. “There would be no fruit, nor would there be coffee or chocolate. I don’t want to live in the world without chocolate.”

Cartiere’s project began with 16 paper making workshops, including one in Ketchum headed up by The Center’s Courtney Gilbert.

The paper was made from recycled paper and embedded with pollinator plant seeds native to each area. Cartiere chose yellow Basket-of-Gold flower seeds for Richmond; orange Blanket Flower seeds for Kelowna and blue Lewis Flax seeds for Ketchum, ensuring different colors and shapes.

She then created 10,000 bee cutouts for the Richmond, hoping people would grasp the enormity of what it’s like to lose 10,000 pollinators in a day. When that installation was ready to come down, she gave half of the cutouts to the city of Kelowna, whose citizens made 5,000 more own.

“It’s as if we split the colony and built up another,” she said.

She took 3,333 from Richmond and another 3,333 from Kelowna, adding them to 3,333 new ones made by Sun Valley residents.

When finished, there will actually be 10,001 bee cutouts on the wall because one is the queen—a fact that will likely engage youngsters as they try to find it, Cartiere said.

She intentionally laid them out on a white background, save for the brown of the birch plywood.

“If I put it on a blue wall, it would pop out quickly, but it wouldn’t inspire people to come in and examine the bees,” she said.

When the project’s over, Cartier plans to give each of the bees away. She hopes people will take them home and plant them.

“In essence, each is a pollinator plant for your garden,” she said.

OTHER BEE EVENTS:

April 20, 5-7:30 p.m. Pollinator Pop Up with The Center and the Environmental Resource Center. Free.

April 21-22: Company of Fools commissioned mini-musical: “Inside, Outside, Upside Down!” at 6 p.m. April 21 and 2 p.m. April 22. Free.

April 24, 6:30 p.m. Panel Discussion titled “What is the Threat?” Free.

April 26, May 24 and June 14, 5:30 p.m. Evening tours of “Bees” exhibit. Free.

April 26, 7 p.m. Film “Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?”  Filmmaker Taggart Siegel, a documentary filmmaker born in the Sun Valley Lodge when it was a hospital, will come from Portland, Ore., to field questions following the screening. Magic Lantern Cinemas. $10 for Center members and $12 for non-members.

April 28, 10 a.m.-1 p.m. Teen Workshop: Ceramic Bee Baths with Boulder Mountain Clayworks.

May 12, 3-5 p.m. Family Day: “Bees and Pollinators.” Free.

May 17, 6-8 pm. Creative Jump-in “Cooking with Honey” with The Haven.

June 9, 2-5 p.m. Free Community Planting Party.

Those making many of the events possible are the Dawson Family, Steve Hobbs, Krekow Jennings, Inc., Lunchford Excavation, A.C. Houston Lumber, Diamond-D Welding, the Springcreek Foundation, Local Food Alliance, Joyce B. Friedman, the Papoose Club, Hailey Rotary and the Kiwanis Club.