: Published: 18 June 2024

Tree beekeepers – eternal guardians of the secrets of bees. Exhibition of photographs by Prof. Krzysztof Heyke

From June 6 to July 5, 2024, from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., the Paleobotany Museum of the Władysław Szafer Institute of Botany of the Polish Academy of Sciences will host an exhibition of photographs by Professor Krzysztof Heyke entitled "Tree Beekeepers – the Eternal Guardians of the Secrets of Bees".

Professor Krzysztof Heyke – photographer, cameraman, traveller, publisher. He graduated from the Institute of Artistic Photography in Prague and the Direction of Photography Department at the Film School in Łódź. Since 1992, he has been teaching photography at his alma mater. He has received numerous awards and is the author of photographs for over a dozen albums. He has presented his works at over 190 individual exhibitions in Poland and abroad, and his photographs can be found in museums and private collections. For three decades, he has been travelling around the former Borderlands of the Republic of Poland and Siberia, recording with his camera the life and traces of the activities of Poles, as well as their descendants. He undertakes important activities for the protection of heritage – he is one of the initiators of the inscription of tree beekeeping on the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2016 and one of the depositaries of the inscription of tree beekeeping culture on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2020.

The exhibition, consisting of 22 photographs presented in the form of banners, is the record of an extraordinary journey through time and space in the footsteps of tree beekeepers and tree beekeeping, a forgotten field, as Professor Heyke himself says. After all, tree beekeeping is an ancient form of caring for bee swarms inhabiting natural hollows, tree hives and log hives. The author's entire collection includes, in addition to fascinating photographs, tree beekeeping tools and other objects, such as ropes and wheels for pulling beekeeping logs onto trees. The fruit of the aforementioned journeys is also the album "The Last Tree Beekeepers of Europe I Met". The author writes: "I came across the trace of tree beekeepers in 2003 in Polesie, when I was taking photos for National Geographic Poland, and since then I have been following their discreet, almost invisible trail".

The exhibition is accompanied by: a film showing the life of tree beekeepers, a live broadcast from the interior of an old piano that has become a home for a bee family, and a presentation on melliferous plants showing the botanical aspect of beekeeping.

We invite you to visit the exhibition and immerse yourself in the raw, honey-smelling world of "eternal interpreters of bee life".