I'm peering nervously into a hive: about 40,000 bees are clambering all over it. They are calm today, says Llyr Jones, a volunteer at London's Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. You know you're in for trouble, he says, when the hive smells of bananas - a smell indicative of the bees' danger pheromone. The bees flit about, occasionally alighting on the oversized beekeeping suit that engulfs me. I have a niggling feeling that one may somehow have got in. But any trepidation is dwarfed by the thrill of spying on a real honeybee colony. And not just any colony, but one linked electronically to Kew's latest installation, The Hive. Visitors to this 17-metre-high immersive sculpture, standing in meadow grasses and flowers, will feel what happens in this beehive. The Hive is a beautiful, geometric meshwork. Its slender aluminium honeycomb lattice harmonises oddly with the surrounding greenery, as though a prop from a sci-fi movie fell into the Shire.
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