In the 1930s, a group of biologists and filmmakers from the Entomology Laboratory of the Natural Science Museum in Madrid began filming nature, documenting the behavior of insects and their habits. One of them was Guillermo Fernández Zúñiga, the artist’s great-uncle. An advocate of film as a scientific and educational tool, he was associated with Republican educational institutions such as the Pedagogical Missions (Misiones Pedagógicas) and the School Institute (Instituto Escuela).

In the laboratory, together with Carlos Velo (Orense, 1909–Mexico City, 1988), also a filmmaker and biologist, they began to record the behavior of bees in hives designed by themselves and built by craftsmen. The hive model allowed observation through transparent glass and conduits through which the bees entered and exited without being disturbed in their work. The films and scientific advances were dismissed for publication after the military uprising of 1936, as both became Republican exiles.

Almost a century later, as part of a more extensive investigation into the archive of Guillermo Fernández Zúñiga, the artist Candela Sotos found future scripts for short films on beekeeping and narratives on the functioning of the observation hive. Danza n III is a project to create a beehive as a useful object to provide a home for bees, but also as a space for transmission, where the artist could also imagine and collaborate with her brother, architect and carpenter Miguel Sotos. Through reading the archives of Carlos Velo and Guillermo Fernández Zúñiga from the 1930s, they reflected on what its form might have been and what they would like it to be today, so that above all the beehive is a device for interaction but not interference.

The hive and the process of its construction become a gesture of memory and a channel of information, where bees, in turn, can communicate in the dark through their dance –the dance is the communication system that worker bees use to convey the direction and distance of the pollen source to their hive mates; to convey this information, the bees use a series of circular and zigzag movements, which their mates observe and interpret– to find the nectar identified by their companions.