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I’m peering nervously into the hive: about 40,000 bees are clambering all over it. They are in a calm mood 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 gives off the smell of bananas, indicative of the bees’ danger pheromone.

The bees flit about, occasionally coming to rest on the over-sized beekeeping suit that engulfs me. I have a niggling (and irrational) feeling that one must have somehow crept between the hem of the baggy suit leg and into my shoe. But any trepidation I feel is dwarfed by the thrill of spying inside a real honeybee colony – and not just any colony, but one linked electronically to Kew’s latest grand installation: .

Visitors to this immersive sculpture, standing 17 metres tall amid meadow grasses and flowers, will experience what happens in this beehive.

The HIve is a beautiful, geometric meshwork. Its slender aluminium honeycomb lattice harmonises strangely with the surrounding greenery, as though a futuristic prop from a sci-fi movie fell into JRR Tolkien’s Shire – except that it works.

The elegant sculpture – an abstracted Fibonacci spiral based on the geometry and physics of a honeycomb – was originally commissioned for the UK’s pavilion at the 2015 World Expo in Milan, Italy. Its theme was “Feeding the Planet”. The Hive’s creator, artist and sculptor , wanted to express the plight of honeybees and their value as natural capital (of the 100 main food crops globally, about 70 are pollinated by bees). His aim was to portray bees as “a sentinel of the planet, a barometer of the state of the Earth”.

He was keen to have scientific rigour at the installation’s heart, and at a friend’s suggestion got in touch with Martin Bencsik, a physicist at Nottingham Trent University, UK.

, aided by a team of architects and engineers, resulted in the award-winning sculpture. Kew’s director, Robert Deverell, serendipitously read about it in a newspaper early last year.

“I thought it was perfect for Kew,” says Deverell. “The perfect way to talk about the vital but intimate relationship between insects and plants.”

A few months later 169,300 pieces of aluminium were stacked in Kew’s car park, awaiting assembly.

Visitors enter the sphere at the sculpture’s heart via an unobtrusive wooden bridge and stand on a clear honeycomb floor beneath an open circle of sky at the dome’s apex. All around, a thousand LED lights flicker and fade, accompanied by about 140 musical arrangements of human voices, cello, guitar and other sounds. It is a prayer in C. Bees, it turns out, buzz in this harmonious key.

The lights and sounds take their cue from the real-life hive I was lucky enough to see. Activity levels in a healthy hive such as this are incredible. The bees “dance” or grab each other with their front legs to frenziedly convey  dorsoventral abdominal vibration signals, possibly to kick their partners into action. An accelerometer buried deep in the hive picks up every information-rich vibration as it resonates through the colony.

Busy bees

Each bee’s vibrations travel only 1-2 centimetres, but as each individual makes its way around the comb repeating the same movements over and over, this means that eventually all vibrations in the hive are picked up by the accelerometer.

As frantic and busy as hive life appears to be, it translates smoothly into the varying soundscape and lights of the sculpture. “I think in a lot of ways, in cities, as a species, we are disconnected from nature,” says Buttress. “In its own small way, the Hive can celebrate that connection.”

As I spoke with Buttress inside the Hive, the dome darkened as black clouds gathered overhead. The sounds in the structure intensified. He explained that the hive would be full of activity as the bees returned chaotically before the rain set in. Sure enough, a few moments later, we started to feel droplets falling. The sounds in the dome tapered away, presumably as the bees hunkered down.

Buttress wanted the Hive to amplify nature, to act as a kind of lens, and he has succeeded. Whether visitors will stop and think about biodiversity and our relationship with plants and pollinators, I don’t know. But it is possible that, in the Zen-like ambience of the Hive, visitors may pause and let the Hive mind reach them.

The Hive opened at Kew on 18 June, and will be open to the public until November 2017.