[BROWNFIELD]
As the train heads towards Manchester, it passes a former industrial building.
The train passes a former building.
It is empty now, abandoned by industry and workers alike, the building is slowly being dismantled.
An exterior wall was been removed. You can see inside, a little like a dolls house. There is a large open space at the bottom. Presumably, this is the factory floor.
The former factory floor.
This floor is covered in debris. Rubble and cryptic structures.
Above the factory floor are a series of rooms that appear as cells. Break-rooms, marketing departments, shipping offices, typing pools, conference rooms. They are lined in ragged wallpaper that visually dates them. Late 60s. Greens, oranges, and yellows, in geometric patterns of lines and hexagons.
Occasional artefacts remain. There are chairs and desks. They are exposed to the weather and are disintegrating in their nakedness, They are haunted by a former purpose. The chair, once for sitting in, is now a rusted ornament.
It could be a totem, or a warning.
This land is deserted. This land is barren. Do not sit. Do not stay here. Move on.
The building shines in the drizzle. Slick red bricks. A monument to the fact that such simple organisms can create complexity under the guidance of a common goal.
The building has a name. It is inlaid in the brickwork.
This is Beehive Mill No. 2.
This hive is in the final stage of collapse.
[NUMBERS]
1940
28,605 nights ago.
2 whole nights.
272 tons of high explosive.
195 tons more.
2,000 incendiary devices.
684 registered dead.
2,000 injured.
400 years after building started, the east end of Manchester Cathedral is destroyed. Every single one of the Victorian stained glass windows are shattered.
56 years to replace all of the windows.
1966 The Fire Window.
1973 St. George.
1976 St. Denys.
1980 St. Mary.
1991 The Creation.
1995 The Apocalypse.
The Apocalypse?
...and then, 1996.
[THE CATHEDRAL]
Hervé slowly lowers the field microphones into the hive. A few feet away Maja is holding the recorder. A cable hangs between my two companions and, combined with the bright white bee keeping suits, gives the impression that Hervé is undertaking some strange space walk.
...which he is, in a way. He's traversing the boundary between the macro world and the micro one. These two spaces that exist together, overlapped and intertwined.
Meanwhile, a bee is attempting its own exploratory mission by pushing its barbed stinger through the mesh of my visor, a few centimetres from my left eye. It's hard to register this as an act of aggression, especially coming from an organism whose only form of attack is mutually assured destruction. Besides, the sweet smell of the smoke drifting from the stainless steel canister soon has a soporific effect on us both.
I slowly make my way to the hive. The suit is cumbersome, hot and claustrophobic, but I am acutely aware of the texture underfoot. It is similar to the crisp crunch of dry Autumnal leaf litter. It even blows around in the breeze, creating drifts and banks against the uneven boundaries.
The detritus is formed, entirely, from the desiccated corpses of bees.
Mostly, worker bees. Thousands of them.
I ask the keeper if this is concerning, and they tell me that it is perfectly normal in the summer for worker bees to die after a few weeks of non-stop work. There is a high turn-over. The queen, however, will generally live for three to four years.
What Maja and Hervé hear, I can't. Away from the hive, Manchester echoes with the sounds of construction. Drilling, sawing, heavy machinery, pops and bangs and explosions that would be alarming in any other context.
The view from the roof of the Cathedral, where we are, where the hives are, is especially telling. The sky is busy with cranes. They look like giant insect organisms, dipping instruments into the city for their own unfathomable purposes.
The beekeeper stands beside me. We look out for a moment, over the red, crumbling Collyhurst sandstone ledge and she says, 'There are hives all over the city, even on the Printworks, over there'.
[VAN]
A van has appeared.
A Luton van is parked on double yellow lines, somewhat close to the corner junction on Corporation Street.
Sunlight is reflecting from the glass of a nearby shop front. It appears to be the Arndale centre. The light stripes the van and distorts the CCTV image that records a policeman inspecting the cab as shoppers pass by.
The date on the recording shows 'SAT 15 JUN 1996'.
The street is now empty. The shoppers have been moved on, the police have retired to a safe distance. Footage from a helicopter highlights the stillness of the scene.
Back to the CCTV footage. A robotic arm on caterpillar tracks approaches the van from behind. Police tape festoons the streets. The robotic arm draws parallel to the driver-side window and lifts up a camera to the cab. It peers in.
Another camera. high up and far away, perhaps on the top of a building. The camera shakes on its perch. The frame wobbles and the van orbits an area in the centre.
So far the footage has been eerily silent.
10.17 am.
The white van becomes a cloud. A flash of yellow and then grey. An explosion. The silence is shattered along with the glass shopfront. The camera zooms out to capture the mushroom cloud of dense white smoke as it rises above a nearby skyscraper.
The van has disappeared.
[DRONES]
Drone music/drone-based music/drone
A minimalist genre that emphasises the use of sustained sounds, notes or tone clusters. Typically characterised by lengthy audio programmes featuring slight or slowly evolving harmonic variations.
[LOOPS]
A repeating section of sound material often manipulated via music technologies including (but not exclusive to) turntables, digital samplers, synthesizers, sequencers, drum machines, delay units, tape loops and computer software.
[THE CITY]
Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude, together known as 'Christo and Jeanne-Claude', were a married couple that created art.
The type of art they typically made is termed 'environmental art'. This is the sort of art that aims to alter our surroundings, often in such a way that highlights an element of it and allows us to examine our relationship with it.
A good example of this is when they wrapped the entire Reichstag, in Berlin, in fabric. They did this to the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris too.
They create a chrysalis for a structure.
As you look out over Manchester, you see many buildings wrapped in material. Some have green netting, others have canvas facades that show what might be beneath. It looks as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude have been on an artistic spree.
There is a difference, however.
They take famous structures and hide them, in plain sight so that when the buildings emerge from these chrysalis, they are not physically transformed, but the way in which we see them is.
Nothing changes inside, the change happens on the outside.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude transform our relationship with buildings through an artistic act that places our perception at the centre.
This is the transformational power of art.
That is not happening here.
This is the transformational power of money.
[THE FORGOTTEN BOMB]
On December 3, 1992 two bombs, each weighing around 1kg, detonated in Manchester city centre. The first exploded at 08.40. It was placed at Parsonage Gardens in the heart of Manchester's financial district. The second detonated at 10.05 in Cateaton Street, close to the city's cathedral.
The financial impact of the damage is estimated at £10 million. The human impact was a total of 65 wounded in the blasts.
The cathedral was also damaged. The impact smashed the clock face and broke stained glass windows.
It is an echo and a shadow, of the bombs that exploded in 1940 and the ones that will go explode in the future.
[THE FORGOTTEN CITY]
New Islington Park, just the other side of Great Ancoats Street, alongside the canal.
A meta city. A city within a city.
A Venn diagram of 'Manchester' and 'homeless'.
It's not that they don't belong here, but it is that they don't belong here.
A city of tents echoes across Manchester. It looks like a campsite, but it can't be camping if you don't have somewhere else to go back to.
See also, Oxford Road, underneath the A57 bridge.
See also, Piccadilly Gardens.
These tents look like a parody of the wrapped buildings across the road. Small cocoons containing people as opposed to the large ones containing empty structures.
When the occupiers of these tiny chrysalises emerge, they will be changed. They will be a little older, they will be a little poorer.
This is also the transformational power of money.
[SMOKE]
The stainless steel smoker was designed by Moses Quinby, a resident of Mohawk Valley, New York in 1873.
Whilst humans had known for a considerable time that smoke calmed bees, it was Quinby that found a system of delivering it via a bellow attached to a tin burner.
Prior to this invention, humans had relied upon nearby campfires, or sticks with smouldering substances on the end. This method is still in use today, including in Nepal, where it is used in the collection of psychotropic honey from cliff colonies. This honey is made from the pollen of a particular Rhododendron species that contains Grayanotoxins. These neurotoxins may cause hallucinations as well as being responsible for the condition known as, 'Mad Honey Intoxication'.
Mad Honey Intoxication is rarely fatal.
The scientific reason behind why smoke calms bees arrived a little later than the smoker and it isn't still fully understood. It appears that the smoke works in two ways. First, it masks alarm pheromones, such as isopentyl acetate, that are released by bees that are threatened or hurt. Second, it initiates a feeding response in the bees in anticipation of hive abandonment due to fire.
Several types of fuel can be used in the smoker including hessian, burlap, pine needles, corrugated cardboard, paper egg cartons and herbs. Bee keepers have reported that the dried female hop flower, which contains the sedative, lupulin, is particularly effective.
[PAVEMENT]
Near the tent city, just outside the Shaheen off-license, there is a man slouched against a wall. His blank, pale face peeks out from the rippled padding of his sleeping bag. He looks like a dejected grub.
Next to him is another man. He has emerged from his bag and is now face-down on the pavement, spread out like a butterfly drying its wings in the sun.
His trousers are pulled low and his buttocks are on show to the whole world, particularly those that have to step over him to get past.
[SMOKE]
Spice is a mix of herbs laced with synthetic chemicals meant to mimic the form and psychoactive substances of cannabis.
The chemicals used in spice are based on the research of an American chemist, John Huffman. In the mid 90s, whilst studying the impact of cannabis on the brain, Huffman developed a compound he named JWH-018.
Most of the spice sold today contains descendants of this chemical. It is easily modified to create variations that have helped it sidestep traditional drug laws.
Spice can make users feel happy and relaxed.
This smoke makes humans docile.
Users recall experiences of feeling brain-dead and paralysed.
There have also been reports of kidney damage, liver damage, strokes, heart attacks and psychosis.
It is strong and cheap, making it appealing to some of society's most vulnerable groups, particularly the homeless.
According to Marc Jones, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Lincolnshire, "Users are increasingly seen slumped on the streets in a state of semi-consciousness, often passed out, sometimes aggressive and always highly unpredictable... this is the most severe public health issue we have faced in decades".
[STREET FURNITURE]
Broxap are a company that claim to be the leading street furniture manufacturer in the UK. The term, 'Street Furniture' encompasses the fixtures and fittings that you can find in any given street. The things that seem bolted down, and part of the scenery.
They make cast iron bollards, DuracastTM polyurethane bollards, steel bollards, stainless steel bollards, concrete bollards, granite bollards, recycled plastic bollards, timber bollards, removable bollards, PAS bollards, security bollards and illuminated bollards.
They make manual telescopic posts, fold down and collapsible posts, lamp post protectors, door barriers, hoop barriers, parking barriers, pedestrian guardrails and hostile vehicle mitigation.
They make cast iron posts and rails, they make DuracastTM polyurethane posts and rails, they make steel bow topped vertical bar fencing.
And cast iron benches, timber benches, steel framed timber benches, steel benches, stainless steel benches, concrete benches, granite benches, nusser benches, fibreglass seating, park benches, memorial benches, recycled plastic benches and, of course, DuracastTM polyurethane benches.
But where Broxap really dominate is in bins.
Steel litter bins, plastic litter bins, external recycling bins, dog waste bins, contemporary litter bins, cast iron litter bins, timber litter bins, grit bins, internal recycling bins, cigarette bins, park litter bins, school litter bins, stainless steel bins and bin liners.
They offer these in a range of styles with exciting names. There's the Derby Eros and Derby Olympus. The Trojan Recycling Bin. The Apollo 100 Hooded.
It is the best way to make something full of rubbish seem classy, name it after Greek gods and mythology.
The litter of the gods. Divine detritus.
This list is heartening because street bins went out of fashion in the early 90s. They were evicted from our streets, not because they were unsightly, or lacked purpose, but because they became a danger.
For example, the City of London removed all of its bins from the Square Mile following the IRA Bishopsgate bombing in 1993. The bomb wasn't placed in a bin, it was placed in a truck. It was a truck bomb... but it could have been a bin bomb.
According to a chronology of terrorist activity from 1992—1995 compiled by counter-terrorism experts, Edward Mickolus and Susan Simmons, the IRA "set off 16 small bombs throughout London, mostly in trash cans and telephone booths".
The City of London reinstated its bins on 2013 after locals complained about the amount of rubbish they were having to contend with in the streets. Sadly, telephone booths have mostly died out through their own lack of use.
When they returned, the bins in the City of London were sleek, black and featured a logo. They had a full coat of arms emblazoned on the front.
The bins in Manchester don't feature the full coat of arms, just the worker bee. Yellow on black.
[A SYMBOL]
The industrial revolution found Manchester at the heart of progress in technology and industry. Factories became hubs hummed with the sound of new machinery. These new, large, noisy buildings became known as hives.
This was how the bee became first associated with Manchester, and the symbol of the worker bee quickly became popular for those that lived in it.
By 1842, the bee had become incorporated into the Manchester coat of arms.
For many Mancunians, the worker bee represents both hard work and working together.
On the coat of arms, the bees represent industry, but not necessarily the workers that enable it.
A hive may be the result of the cooperation of many individuals, but ultimately there is one that benefits more than any other. If the people of Manchester saw themselves as worker bees, what did they see as the queen?
Were the factory owners the queens of the hives?
Was money their nectar?
Or was it industry?
Did the workers see any parallels between the worker bees in the mills and the dry corpses piled up on the floor at the foot of a beehive?
[THE QUEEN]
At the very start of their lives, all bee larvae are fed a mixture of proteins and sugars that are secreted from glands on the heads of worker bees. This is 'royal jelly'.
After three days drones and worker bees are weened off the jelly, and onto pollen and nectar, but the larvae destined to become queens continue to be fed with it.
That's the difference between workers and queens... diet. A diet that enables the queen bee to become the largest of the bees in the hive.
The queen's only real job is to lay eggs. Quite a lot of eggs. About 1500 a day.
These eggs are destined to become more workers and drones. The queen controls this by laying fertilised eggs to create female workers or unfertilised eggs to create male drones.
The queen is able to fertilise the eggs selectively through controlling the release of sperm from her spermatheca as the egg passes through her oviduct.
The other main difference between the worker bee and the queen is that whilst the worker bee dies if it uses its sting, the queen can sting as many times as it wishes.
[PICCADILLY GARDENS]
We are stood by Piccadilly Gardens. It is early, just after seven in the morning.
Hervé and Maja are preparing to record some of the trams as they pass by, full of commuters heading in to the city.
There is a grass bank, about 10 metres away. There is a man lying on his back on the damp grass of the bank. He is mostly asleep.
The only motion is his right arm. His hand is inside is trousers. He is clearly masturbating.
This doesn't appear to be a deliberate act of indecency, rather the result of this human, for a brief moment, forgetting his situation. Right now the man is in a bed, in the privacy of his own home, in the warm...
He is dragged out of his delusion by a passing street sweeper. This man carries a stick with a grabbing hand that can pick up litter. He uses this stick to prod the man on the grass bank.
The first human contact of the day is with a tool used to grab rubbish.
The man removes his hands from his trousers, staggers to his feet and shuffles off into the centre of the city.
The gardens have started to fill now. There is a mix of people heading to work and other people, asking them questions.
There is now a man about my age, perhaps a little younger. He's a lot thinner than me and has fewer visible teeth. He asks if I can spare him a cigarette.
I explain that I haven't smoked in over five years, but that sometimes I still wish that I did. He admits it is a habit he would like to give up. I mention that in my dreams I am still a smoker. He says that he can't remember his last dream.
I reach into my pocket to see if I have any change, but before I can pull it out, he has left in search of another person to ask.
He makes his way around the gardens, briefly stopping at each person and then asking them the same question. Most don't even stop to answer, none hand anything over, and even the ones that are smoking seem to declare that they don't have any cigarettes. He doesn't take this as a personal slight, rather just the way it always is. He operates with the stoicism of someone that asks a lot and is rarely answered. I suspect this is how he spends a great deal of his time.
He eventually completes an entire lap and is once again heading in my direction. I smile and reach into my pocket. He asks me if I can spare him a cigarette.
I explain that I haven't smoked in over five years, but that sometimes I still wish that I did. He admits it is a habit he would like to give up. I mention that in my dreams I am still a smoker. He says that he can't remember his last dream.
Poverty is loops and drones.
All day loops and every day drones.
[DRONE]
Drones are all male bees that have only one purpose in the hive. Their only job is to mate with the queen to help her produce offspring.
Doing so is fatal to the drone as the queen removes the drone's sexual organs in order to store their sperm within her body.
The drones that are not fortunate enough to die in this manner are ejected from the hive in the Autumn.
Drones cannot kill or hurt anything. They cannot survive on their own, outside of the hive.
[STREET FURNITURE]
It is some times called 'Defensive Architecture'. A euphemism that somehow suggests that architecture needs defending. That buildings are under attack.
It is also referred to as 'Hostile Architectural Design'. There's a war and architecture is involved.
On the front line of this war is street furniture.
The enemy are the homeless. The enemy are people.
People that want to lie down on benches, because it is the only place that isn't the ground. People that shelter in doorways, not through choice but through necessity. People who really could do with help and compassion.
Defensive architecture is a strange way to kick someone when they are down.
Subtle forms such as sloping benches, arm-rests, blue lights in public toilets give way to more obvious and draconian measures.
Less than a mile away from the bins in the City of London, on the Curtain Road, spikes have been installed to prevent homeless people from sleeping there.
In Seattle, the Department of Transportation have used the tactic of installing bicycle racks wherever they have problems with homeless camps.
And in Manchester, the spaces outside Selfridges, not far from the Cathedral, are lined with spikes reminiscent of a medieval torture instrument because it has been decided that these are easier to look at that people in need of support.
Homelessness is seen as a form of terrorism. It threatens capitalism and the structures it inhabits. We could spend some money on creating systems to help people, homes for housing, support for mental illness, physical illness and addiction. Or, we could just put spikes on things so we can buy stuff without having to confront the problems that exist in our cities.
[WORKERS]
Worker bees are all female. They are born sterile and their purpose is to work for their entire lifespan.
They are the hive. Without worker bees, there would be no one to care for the queen, or produce honey.
Worker bees have a variety of jobs throughout their five-week lifespan that change according to their age.
The very first job of the worker bee is house-keeping. In this role, they prepare the cells for a new egg or nectar and when a bee emerges from a cell the clean up by removing the cocoon-like wrapping left behind, along with any other bodily waste.
If the worker be survives, they graduate to removing the corpses of their peers as well as maintaining the cells and using wax to cap them after larva have been deposited.
The worker can then be promoted to nursery care where they feed and clean the developing larvae. Worker bees will check the young over a thousand times a day. During this period, the worker bee can be expected to feed the developing larva up to 10,000 times.
Providing their corpse hasn't been carted out by a slightly younger worker bee, the next step is to attend the queen. Clean her, feed her, take care of her waste.
As they approach middle age, the worker bees take on the role of stockroom control. They are responsible for transporting packets of nectar to cells for sealing and fanning as it turns into honey.
The nectar is brought in by the oldest workers as they technically become field bees. These are the bees you see outside the hive. They are the old workers. They are the bees that bring back pollen. They are the bees that pile up in drifts at the foot of the hive.
[NON-WORKERS]
At the time of writing, and according to the 'Poverty and Social Exclusion in the United Kingdom' research project, an estimated 600,000 Manchester residents are experiencing the effects of extreme poverty with a further 1.6 million people at risk of sliding into it.
Official figures show that Manchester has 278 people, sleeping rough and without a home in 2019.
That's 41% higher than the 2016 figure of 164.
However, over 500 more people have been referred to services by GPs, charities and social workers as long term homeless in the same period.
Someone can be homeless and on the streets for 364 nights of a year, but if they find a bed for one night they are no longer counted in the statistics.
The Manchester Evening News called this 'Manchester's Hidden Homeless Crisis'. They don't mean that the homeless are hidden, rather the scale of the crisis is being deliberately distorted.
In 2017, 21 people died whilst sleeping on the streets of Manchester. The highest death rate amongst homeless in the UK.
[ANOTHER BOMB]
Shortly after an Ariana Grande concert, at 22.31 on 22 May, 2017, a bomb filled with nuts and bolts detonated in the foyer area of Manchester Arena killing 23 people, including the attacker, and wounding 139 more, half of which were children.
[A DIFFERENT SYMBOL]
“They were queuing outside of our shop, down the street. Three of our artists did them for 12 hours straight for three days. ... It was amazing how people came together.” -- James Davis, tattoo artist at Alchemy Tattoo Studio.
[CLOUD 23]
This could be Apollo 23, or Iris 23, or Eros 23. There isn't a sign to tell us. We can only be sure that, wherever we are, it ends in 23.
There is a party next door in the Zeus 23 lounge. A curtain prevents us from seeing precisely what is happening beyond the divide, but the sound leaks out easily enough.
Hervé looks uncomfortable. It may be that he finds the late night Thursday party atmosphere of the Manchester Hilton disagreeable in general. However I suspect it has as much to do with having spent much of his career finely tuning his hearing to delicate ambient sounds and not the thumping bass bellowing from the Zeus 23 lounge.
I jot down some of the lyrics.
/This could take some time/I made too many mistakes/Better get this right./
This bar is known to be the haunt of young footballers and stars of Coronation Street. It is a destination for the wealthy of Manchester to enjoy cocktails and champagne in a civilised atmosphere. The house champagne costs £15 a glass. A double rum and coke can be obtained for £20.50.
In this particular manifestation of mount Olympus the gods share a toilet. In the gents, a group of twenty-somethings snort cocaine off a sink counter, just inside the door. They don't seem bothered by my presence. They don't seem concerned that I would be bothered by theirs. This is their space, where they belong.
All three of us sit around a table looking out across the city. We stare through our reflections and watch the lights flicker in the distance the traffic moves in the night.
Up here, on the 23rd floor of the Hilton, in a lounge named after a Greek god, you can just about make out the tents that line the canal below, but you have to look pretty hard.
[TATTOO]
Ariana Grande has, reportedly, over 40 tattoos. These range in design from simple words, and numbers to a delicate rendering of a butterfly. She has a quote on her left shoulder from the 1998 film, 'The Truman Show'. It reads.
"In case I don't see ya good afternoon good evening and good night!"
A vine, wrapped around a finger on her right hand covers a previous tattoo that read, '9 3/4'. This was a reference to the once popular Harry Potter stories.
Ariana previously had the name 'Pete' tattooed on a finger.
This has since been covered with a black heart.
There is also the story of a picture, posted to Instagram, of a tattoo that was meant to say '7 Rings' in Japanese, in order to celebrate the '7 Rings Tour'. It's not clear if Ariana is fluent in Japanese Kanji, but on this occasion, people pointed out that the tattoo actually read, 'small charcoal grill'. In an interview she claimed, that the design would not last, as skin on the palm regrows faster than that on the rest of the body and tattoos there usually fade.
In May, 2018, Grande revealed a Bee tattoo in solidarity with the victims of the bombing and the people of Manchester. Below the post she wrote the word "forever".
Ariana Grande previously had the word 'Always' tattooed across a rib. It has since been incorporated into a stylised leaf.
[HIVE COLLAPSE]
Colony Collapse Disorder is a phenomenon where the majority of worker bees disappear from the hive. This leaves behind a queen, plenty of food and perhaps some larvae.
Typically, there are few dead bees found near the hive.
Despite the honey and pollen reserves the hives are unable to support themselves without the worker bees ultimately leading to death.
It is currently unknown exactly what causes colony collapse disorder, although a few theories have been forwarded.
Parasites such as the invasive Varroa mite and the gut parasite, Nosema. Pesticide poisoning through exposure to sprayed crops. Stress due to management practices such as transportation. Changes to the environment, including foraging flora leading to poor nutrition.
In all of these scenarios, the explanations fail to address the actual reason why the workers would abandon their queen. It serves no evolutionary sense as the bees are sterile. Their revolution will not benefit their young, and will certainly lead to their own eventual demise.
Perhaps the workers find more sense in this than seeing the corpses drift and pile at the foot of the hive.
[ECONOMIC COLLAPSE]
We are back in the Cloud 23. The party in the Zeus 23 lounge is underway. The cocaine is plentiful and the music loud. The windows reflect the party-goers as they dance. Their ghostly, translucent forms superimposed on the night sky. The one that looks like glitter and tar. The tents are still far away, down below.
Everything seems pretty good from up here, but this situation is a symptom of an oncoming disaster. A collapse.
The New Economics Foundation, a think-tank that promotes social, economic and environmental justice, lists four situations that can serve as indicators for economic instability.
- Increasing inequality. This depresses demand since consumption levels depend more on the wages of those at the lower end of the income scale, than the profits of the wealthy
- Stagnating wages. Here, households rely increasingly on debt to maintain their lifestyles with rising asset prices, especially in residential housing, worsening this.
- Financial liberalisation. This allows money to flood into countries with trade deficits, such as the USA and the UK, providing the funds for debt-led consumption.
- Snowballing wealth at the top. This increases risky financial speculation.
The disparity, between the rich and the poor, between the shiny skyscrapers and the city of tents, is not progress in one direction. It is progress in two directions at once. It is a city tearing itself apart with ever growing ferocity.
[THE HIVE]
Hervé could place his microphones deep inside the hexagonal walls and hear almost nothing. This is a former hive.
It is slowly decaying. Abandoned cells, decorated in wax are crumbling and dry. Without the bees these spaces are just cryptic geometry.
Somewhere, deep in the hive, a lonely queen sits in her own filth. She is hungry. There is food, in the hive but the workers normally bring it to her and she has no idea how to get her own.
The queen does not know why they left. She does not know where they went.
Perhaps she gains some solace from the fact that they will die as surely as she will.
This is no longer a hive, but a warning. A totem.
This hive has collapsed.
[THE HIVE]
