Apis fratris ♂ – Buckfast Bee

A male Buckfast honeybee, painted from life, every hair and grain of pollen true.

An anatomically exact contemporary watercolour, made as an archival fine art print.

It is a Buckfast bee, the strain bred a century ago by Brother Adam, a monk at Buckfast Abbey in England. So Apis fratris is literal: the bee of the brother. The mark ♂ tells you it is a drone, a male. Nothing here is invented.

This is my first anatomically accurate painting, and it pushed me past everything I knew. I never trained, I work from what I see, and for this I let go of a single medium and reached for four at once by feel: watercolour, white gouache, coloured pencil, and pearlescent oil pastel for the wings. I painted it from life, kneeling in my garden with real bees in the air, the females out working and the drones idling around the hive.

Get close to the hairs, the pollen caught on the legs, the light bending across the wing. Nothing tells you a hand did this except the work itself, every hair of it painted on an original of about twelve to thirteen centimetres.

Living with a bee is a quiet, daily way of honouring the thing that builds most of what we eat. A hive is less a swarm than a single organism made of thousands, one that renews itself and never quite dies. And this is its drone: a male hatched from an unfertilised egg, with no father, whose one purpose is to carry the line forward.

Printed to order on Hahnemühle German Etching, a heavyweight 310gsm mould-made fine art paper, acid- and lignin-free to museum standard, with archival pigment inks. A giclée from an original watercolour by Léna Ruisz, never a mass reproduction, colour-managed to stay true to the original painting. Because every screen shows colour a little differently, what you see on your device may vary slightly from the finished print. Free worldwide shipping, arriving ready to live with. No frame is forced on you, so choose the size that fits your wall.

You are buying the fine art print only. The frame shown in the product image, and any mount, furniture, plants or other props in the photographs, are there to show scale and setting. They are not included in your purchase.