Beekeeper Creates Electronic Music out of Profession

Creating some cool beats out of bees, yeap, that might be what you need right at the moment. 

Meet Bioni Samp, a beekeeper and a musician from London, U.K. A man who literally combines technology and nature. He makes his own 'homemade' synthesizers which use actual bee sounds to create real art through electronic music.

Bioni, who says to be in his fifties, had started beekeeping as a child in Yorkshire, northern England. His love and inspiration for punk music as a young man seemingly didn't perish.

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"I like music what only has a few notes," Bioni says. And that's why he chose punk music on his way to this new kind of art. 

It seems like he started doing it on a small scale at first, but you might check his website to listen to the audio releases and live performances. His performance at Sample Music Festival in Berlin, 2019 attracted some fan-crowd over.  

How does he record the bee sounds? 

He crafted a wooden frame, with microphones fastened around it. And guess what? He just lets the frame inside the beehives and records their sounds.

Each beehive has three types of bees, he explains; a queen, workers, and drones. And each type of bee has its own frequency range. He records the sounds and isolates different frequencies through software. He adds those sounds to synthesizers. "When I play synthesizers, the frequencies overlap to create harmonies," he adds. When low, medium, and high frequencies cross over, they cancel each other out. 

For the last 50 years, half of the bee population around the world has reduced, Bioni says. And that's where he wanted to step in to raise awareness about his old friends and the plants.

Watch his short documentary video below.