Article by Stephen Pickering

There have not been many good vibrations in the seismic industry recently, with many geophysicists laid off, and equipment lying idle. Just what can we do with all that equipment, including many hundreds of thousands of geophones and accelerometers, after all as Plato said, Necessity is the Mother of Invention?

The Hive is an art installation currently situated in Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, London, designed by Wolfgang Buttress and others originally for Milan Expo 2015. The installation is 17m high and is a visual and sensual delight representing the life of a bee colony, but what impressed me most were the thousand LED lights inside the Hive which continually flicker and then fade. Why and how I ask?

Well, based upon the research of Dr Martin Bencsik at Nottingham Trent University honey bees communicate by vibrating different pulses in unison. The Hive is connected to real honey bee hives elsewhere in Kew Gardens where accelerometers within the hives detect the sound of honey bee vibrations and convert it into an electrical field which lights up the art installation, the lights oscillating according to the signals from the bees.

Can I image a future world after the hydrocarbon age full of flowers, bees and renewable energy from good vibrations I ask!

As Brian Wilson said in the song;

Good good good good vibrations (Oom bop, bop);

They’re giving me excitations (Oom bop, bop, excitations)