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If a budding design superstar created a Science Fair project, it might resemble Studio Libertiny's amazing "Made by Bees" vase. This
classically-shaped vase, made of honeycomb and as the name suggests,
made BY bees -- has to be one of the oddest, rarest and wonderfully
weirdest design items we've ever run across. The
vase was originally created in 2006, when Rotterdam-based,
Slovakian-born designer Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny teamed with the
Entomology Research Center at Wageningen University for a rather
unusual experiment. The designer constructed a
"vase-shaped" hive from wax sheets, and allowed 40,000 bees to colonize
it and build a honeycomb around it. The resulting honeycomb vase wound up in the MoMA collection in 2007. Now, Libertiny has improved on the original, adding color to the mix. He
adds a red wax dye to the hive before the bees begin building, and the
resulting honeycomb vase emerges in a bright, vivid red. Since
each vase takes a full week and the efforts of 40,000 bees to produce,
no doubt they don't come cheap and preserving the finished product
requires temperature control and special maintenance. Each
vase comes with a numbered certificate from the artist and is
hopefully free of stowaway "workers" so the lucky owner doesn't get
stung. At least by anything more than the price tag
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