Here´s a live feed of the #tweehive buzz, which is a replica of the big screens on display at London´s Southbank. Many of us could not attend in person, but certainly accompanied the event online.

It made me wonder that Twitter perhaps would have been more worthy of the name Buzzer, as I regard bees with greater affection than birds. But then again I also have a appreciation of spiders more than beatles, and yet rock band of the same namesake never suffered a popularity loss as a result of their choice.

My avatar was transformed for the day to a bee. The image, seen here, was used with kind permission of a Dutch photographer, based in Southern Spain called Jerome van Passel.

Check out more photos of bees by Jerome on Flickr.

Such was the event that I´m now reading up on the merits and in´s and out´s of beekeeping and seriously considering giving it a go from Switzerland where I´m blogging from in addition to my recent foray in chicken rearing!

I think the viral internet element to the Tweehive campaign was a fantastic idea and I wish the organisers continued success in raising awareness of the importance of bees.

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Throughout history, architects have emulated the building powers of bees using honeycomb motifs in their designs. This has continued into modern times, and has led architects in wildly different directions as they have tried again and again to transpose the spirit of the beehive on to human living space.

For example, both Antoni Gaudí (1852-1926), arguably the greatest architect of the late nineteenth century, and Le Corbusier (1887-1965), arguably the greatest of the first half of the twentieth, drew inspiration from the lives of bees, but with starkly diverging results.

Gaudí was an eccentric but pious man, who died aged seventy-five when he was hit by a trolley bus on the way to vespers. He never married. For him, the beehive provided a way of fusing his Catholic faith with an almost Moorish love of organic natural forms. Gaudí´s designs, often for Catalan chapels, were florid, symbolic and somewhat mind-boggling, with bizarre mixtures of reptilian metalwork and geometric forms so intricate and alive that you could barely look at them. Gaudí´ most famous architectural invention was the parabolic arch, whose haunting shape was exactly the same as that made by the bees when they build a natural honeycomb, unaided by the hives imposed by men.

From the 1880´s onwards, these parabolas became Gaudí´s trademark. He used them in entrances, in attics, in windows. Gaudí loved bees for all the reasons you might expect a frugal working-class Catalan vegetarian to love them. Honey was the only luxury food he allowed himself in a diet which otherwise consisted of green vegetables, wholemeal bread and yoghurt. Gaudí revered the bees as workers like himself, who knew necessity and pain of sacrifice. He was a champion of the Catalan co-operative movement, and drew worker bees on posters to promote the cause. Meanwhile, in one of his most famous buildings, the Palacio Güell in Barcelona, he designed a vast honeycombed cupola, with some of the cells cut out so that light shines through – forming a kind of symbolic hive in which anyone entering can feel that they belong, like a bee.

It was a very different vision of bees that informed the work of Le Corbusier. Where Gaudí was anarchic, Le Corbusier was formal. Where Gaudí was traditional, le Corbusier was a modernist through and through, the author of books called Urbanism (1925) and The City of Tomorrow (1929). It was he who declared, ´The house is a machine for living in´. Where Gaudí borrowed from teh exuberance of natural honeycomb, Le Corbusier used the box-shaped forms of the modern apiary. He read The Dancing Bees by the scientist Karl von Frisch several times, making extensive notes in the margin. What excited him about the beehive was the cleanliness and efficiency, the dream of collective action. He stole from modern apiculture the idea of ´precise breathing´ or temperature control. Humans, he believed, would live best if they could accommodate themselves in ´individual living cells´, self sufficient housing complexes in which all needs could be meet under a single roof.

After the Second World War, he oversaw the reconstruction of Marseille, where he built vast, concrete vertical communities, each of which could house 1,600 people. Like the beehives of his native Switzerland, these human hives were raised off the ground on stilts. he hoped that people living there could forget the troubles of war and learn to lead a perfect life, motivated by ´the desire to live efficiently and in harmony´.

But efficiency is not everyone´s idea of harmony. When we look now at Le Corbusier´s concrete blocks on stilts, it is easy to get the creeps. for many people, they have a sinister, totalitarian feel. Sometimes when people wish to disparage concrete apartment blocks in the style of Le Corbusier they refer to them as ´anthills´or ´beehives´, implying that the collective has taken precedence over the individual.

Little do they consider that this may have been precisely the architect´s intention in the first place.

The leading British entomologist of honeybees, Professor Francis Ratnieks, compares the partitioning of roles in the hie to the efficiency of a modern supermarket. The shoppers, Ratnieks suggests, are the forager bees. The cashiers are the nectar-recieving bees, who hold out their tongues ready to suck up the nectar as it is regurgitated by the returning foragers. For an efficient hive, you need a good balance of foragers and recivers, just as a supermarket needs a good balance of shoppers and cashiers. All too often the human supermarket gets this wrong, resulting in either rows of bored cashiers with no one to serve or, more often, great snaking queues of harased customers all waiting for a single checkout. Yet in the hive, astonishingly, such imbalance is almost unknown. Ratnieks argues that honey-bees are superior to humans in the way they partition tasks because, whereas a supermarket depends on centralized management, the honeybee colony works in a decentralized way, each forager making her own decision about which receiver will et her nectar. If there is a delay in a forager being served by one receiver bee, she will simply go to another; she will not wait, fuming and silently cursing, in a line, as the hapless human shopper does. If there are too few bee receivers, more workers will switch to this task straight away; the problem does not have to be identified by the supermarket manager and blared out over a tannoy. The way that the bees partition their work is `simpler´ than that of humans, concludes Ratnieks. ´And it works.´

I knew that these creatures were important to agriculture, but just how vital and at risk they were did not strike me until I did a little research on the internet. The information is no longer contained to the green movement, but is increasingly becoming mainstream news and not just in the USA.

With an estimated 30% of food being dependant on the actions of the honey bee and the severe decline in numbers reported worldwide due to disease and environmental conditions, the need to support the honey bee is ever more important.

Support for bees is not just misplaced sentimentalism or the latest eco fashion either, the honey bee is the US’s key agricultural pollinator. As such it is worth $14bn to the country’s economy or about £200 million to the annual British economy.

It´s only now that scientists are beginning to unravel the clues to the decline of these wonderful creatures.

Perhaps if the death of these creatures made the headlines in the same dramatic fashion that Mad Cow disease did, with graphic images of ailing cows, then the public at large may realise the severity of the decline of the bee.

Later today, as previously promised, I will be blogging and tweeting selected extracts from the The Hive, the magnificent book by Bee Wilson, published by John Murray publishers, who have kindly given permission to reproduce parts of the book which is available on Amazon.

If you´re in London, Southbank, be sure to attend the Pestival which Tweehive is part of.

If you want to stay upto date with all our Tweehive content, you can follow me on Twitter or subscribe to our exclusive Tweehive RSS feed which will be continually updated this weekend with Bee only content.

Let the buzz begin!

My avatar on Twitter was also transformed to a Honey Bee, and as a result there was a swarm of activity on our site, as it became part of the global treasure hunt for bees looking for blossoming flowers placed all over the web. We supported the #tweehive movement on Twitter and will continue to do so in coming months. Tweehive is a delightful campaign aimed at raising awareness of a serious subject – that of the decline of the bumble bee – one of nature´s finest creations.

As an owner of a holiday chalet in Chamonix, I´m well aware of the outstanding natural beauty appeal of the valley for all summer and winter tourists, and believe we must all do our part to maintain and contribute to sustainable living and tourism.

Honey Bees, commonly known as Bumble Bees (Apis mellifera) are magical creatures and are in real danger of terminal decline due to a variety of factors including pollution caused by our relentless environmentally destructive consumption patterns. The importance and role of the honey bee to the environmental ecosystem is hugely significant.

There are some excellent articles about the Tweehive campaign, which explain in detail the innovative nature of it and how you can get involved, be it as a web publisher or as a reader, online or offline. Check out the coverage from the green bastion of news that is Treehugger, and if you are a motivated urban dweller, why consider the merits of becoming a beekeeper!

As an avid reader, one of my favourite I books I consumed last year was The Hive which is available on Amazon and during the next Tweehive event on September 5th 2009, I will be Tweeting some prize extracts from this enchanting book.