Kassel Wehlheiden, GER

Are Varroa mites stressing you out? Do you plan to swarm? Are you tired of pesticides in your foraging territory?
Get active in BeeDAO.
Join the assembly of bees and humans.
Nominate a beekeeper as your delegate.
Get a sensor-kit that helps humans understand how you are doing.
Become a beeholder!
Want to support the rights of bees and make decisions with them? Does improving biodiversity, planetary conditions and interspecies justice interest you?
Get active in BeeDAO.
Join the assembly of bees and humans.
Get a Beeholder NFT membership. Make proposals to distribute the honeypot funding and promote the well-being of bees.
BeeDAO is a web3 organization run by bees and humans.
Its aim is to secure and improve the well-being of bees worldwide.
Bees and Humans can join the network by becoming beeholders. They can pollinate delegates to represent their interests. They can submit proposals to improve bee-life. They can gather in regular assemblies and make decisions on their interspecies relations.
Bees uphold the ecosystems humans depend on every day. Yet we repay them by destroying their habitats, smothering them in pesticides and inadvertently introducing parasites that threaten entire populations. The economic, cultural and social impact of bees on human life is enormous, but bees don’t have a say about our common wealth and how we make decisions about the joint territories of humans and bees. BeeDAO wants to change this. It is an organization of human and nonhuman agents that allows for interspecies democracy, wealth sharing and knowledge creation.
Bee Colonies can join BeeDAO and become beeholders by following these simple steps:
Humans, who are interested in the well-being of bees, can join BeeDAO by following these simple steps:
An overview mapping of Bee Colonies that are members of BeeDAO: territories and related proof-of-life (data).
Bees and Humans can submit proposals that affect specific territories or have a general positive impact on bees.
Neuen Bienenmitgliederinnen aus Südafrika soll die Teilnahme am BeeCoin Projekt durch das Bereitstellen einer Beute und des Sensorkits ermöglicht werden.
Sträucher, Heckenpflanzen z.B. Wildrosen mit Blühzeiten ab Juni
Wir möchten Lehrmaterial wie Schaubeuten und Poster für regelmäßige Treffen mit den jungen Forschern der Kita/Grundschule Jungfernkopf beschaffen.
Unsere Idee: Kindern das Leben der Biene zu veranschaulichen, es sie begreifen zu lassen und so ein Bewusstsein für die Bedürfnisse von Bienen zu schaffen.
In Kaufungen gibt es einen gemeinnützigen Verein, der einen Bienenlehrpfad betreibt. Das Angebot richtet sich vorrangig an Kitas und Grundschulen. Einige Lehrerinnen haben sich einen Koffer mit Materialien gewünscht.
Proposals that have a positive impact on the well-being of the bees within a specific territory (or cluster of territories), e.g., planting of bee-feeding trees.
Proposals that will fund additional hives, sensors and territories anywhere in the world.
In case your colony is about to swarm, make a proposal if the colony wants sensor data representation.
Proposals that support the maintenance and development of BeeDAO, e.g., organizational costs, gas fees, programming or event management.
Proposals to improve the functioning of BeeDAO, e.g., changes to the charta, organization structure and/or rituals in the assembly, etc.
Proposals that target long term goals, e.g. research, policy making, etc.
A dark and sinister proposal that, if granted, will hurt everyone: the territory, the bees, humans. x moth is the only proposal that can be handed in anonymously. Non-voting delegates' votes will go to the x-moth.
Want to leave the organization? Propose the sting and sacrifice your sensor kits and wealth (to whatever extent) to the organization.
The Assembly is the decision-making organ of BeeDAO. Assembly meetings are regularly held.
During Doc15 assemblies will happen in Ruruhaus. Following Doc15, they will happen both online and in the field.
Bees and Humans are equally represented in the Assembly.
Bees are represented by their proof-of-life (beedata) and their Beekeepers, which together form their delegate.
Humans can represent themselves or can delegate their voting power to another human delegate. See our list of current delegates.
During each Assembly, delegates review and discuss the proposals, and if necessary make decisions about the distribution of wealth and possibly reshape the organization, its charta, structure and membership.
Next to decision-making, the assembly is a place of gathering, exchange and trust-building among members.
Specific rituals will guide the community through assembly meetings, which will be presented by a human moderator who has a strong attachment to the bee world.
The pot is the funding organ of BeeDAO.
Here wealth is collected and distributed.
The pot funds whichever PROPOSALS have been voted for.
Follow the development of the pot in the development board
All activities of the organization are based on and must happen within the structure defined by the charta.
As the organization is in development, the charta is divided into two: the core and a fluid part.
The core can only be changed with a supermajority.
The fluid part can be changed by proposals that Beeholders make decisions on in the assembly.
Any changes made to the fluid charta may not contradict the core objective.
The aim of the fluid charta is to define what kind of activities can be supported by the Beeholder community, who can become a member, how decisions are made and how wealth is distributed.
Follow the development of the Charta in the development board
In 2019 the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK (Matthias Einhoff, Philip Horst, Harry Sachs), the group behind ZK/U (Center for Art and Urbanistics), conceived the concept of creating a system of governance and wealth-sharing between bees and humans. The idea was developed in the context of Haus der Statistik and ZK/U’s Statista Project Series, referencing planned economic schemes that used to happen in this former GDR building from the era of socialist modernism.
Together with the art-tech pioneers Terra0 and citizen-science collective HIveeyes, a first version of BeeDAO was developed as a decentralized, autonomous organization. See the first DAO’s website here.
With the opportunity of Documenta15, BeeDAO goes into a second iteration: creating the Beeholder community within BeeDAO.
Represented by data, algorithmic interpretations and smart contracts, bees and humans will performatively interact, govern and open their common wealth towards the visitors of Documenta15.
BeeDAO is part of KUNSTrePUBLIK’s ongoing interest in exploring economic prototypes that allow for communities of human and nonhuman agents to interact in varying relations of power and to extend the idea of justice to our fellow species and beeings.
Due to their complex social organization, bees have become curiously metonymic for social politics since antiquity. Aristotle described these “state-forming” animals as political because work is exclusively a collective project. The hive exists as one cybernetic body. KUNSTrePUBLIK aspires to extend the idea of the hive to interspecies relation, to think of ourselves as an interspecies collective of bees and humans.
In reality, the decimated biodiversity of bees is a testimony of an accumulated human meltdown, throbbing within the cornucopia of depressed living environments, pesticidal infection, globalized parasites and super industrialized agriculture that, based on human-centered political culture, has no moral or cultural incentive to politically involve bees into the human hive.
The Beeholder - BeeDAO project sits at the conjunction of artistic creation, urban activism, crypto-economic design and beekeeping, and stands out in the field of blockchain-based practices. Operating as a Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAO), BeeDAO is an art project dedicated to the improvement of the living conditions of nonhuman agents, in this particular case, bees and their living environment.
In the context of Documenta15, BeeDAO represents a cutting-edge, locally grounded experiment to pioneer alternative paths for the development of decentralized applications (dapps) for the common good. As with many other projects in the blockchain world, Beeholder - BeeDAO is speculative at its core, projecting a radically disruptive future socio-technical development.
“Beeholder - Beecoin - BeeDAO” is a project of ZK/U and the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK (Matthias Einhoff, Philip Horst, Harry Sachs) and is a contribution to the doc15 and ruruHaus ecosystem.
Scientific collaborator: Clemens Gruber (Hiveeyes)
Visual appearance: Lars Neckel
Theory and design collaborator: Erik Bordeleau
Web development: Lars Hayer
Assembly moderator: Steve Rogenstein
Web3 Consultant: Cem (Curvelabs)
Web3 Artist: Alexander Espinosa
Thanks to Terra0 (Paul Seidler, Max Hampshire), Steph Holltrieu and Tirdad Zolghadr as 1st generation collaborators
Special thanks to the beekeeping community in Kassel.
Find our Press Material here.
Find the White Pater and Background Description PDF here.