Daucus carota, Wild Carrot
Artist: Sarah Red-Laird
Title: Bee Habitat in Cyanotype 81
Location: Trisaetum’s Coast Range Vineyard, Oregon
Flower: Daucus carota, Wild Carrot
Bee: Apis mellifera, the honey bee
Materials: Cyanotype
Field Season: 2022
Composed: 2024
The Artist
Sarah Red-Laird is a melittologist, artist, conservationist, and founder and co-director of the nonprofit organization, Bee Regenerative.
She spends the colder months living near her Southern Oregon art studio and “field season” in Montana and South Dakota in her campervan/bee lab studying bees, bison, cattle, and the plants and soil that connect them.
She works with cyanotype to create images of the flowers and charismatic mega and mini-fauna she studies.
Sarah lives her life outside of the bounds of convention to be close to the natural world where the sky is big, the water talks, the air hums, and the ground rumbles with buffalo bellows. Through her art, she hopes to bring you closer to this world, as well.
The Piece
The flower in this print goes by two names. The botanical name is Daucus carota, wild carrot — the same species as the orange thing in the produce aisle. Pull one up by the rosette in its first year and you will find an unmistakably carrot-shaped root, paler and woodier than its cultivated cousin but a carrot all the same. The common name most people know is Queen Anne’s lace.
Wild carrot is a biennial. In its first year it produces nothing but a low rosette of feathery, carrot-shaped leaves and a slim white taproot. In its second year it sends up a stalk three or four feet tall and unfolds a flat-topped umbel — an upside-down umbrella of hundreds of tiny five-petaled white flowers, each smaller than a grain of rice, packed together into a single landing pad for any insect that wants to come and graze. At the very center of most umbels, surrounded by white, sits one tiny dark red or purple-black flower. The English legend has it that this is where Queen Anne pricked her finger on a needle while making her lace, and that the drop of blood is still there at the center of the flower.
Whatever the dark flower is actually for — there are good ecological hypotheses about it attracting insects to the umbel, or mimicking insects already present so others come to investigate — it is undeniably what makes a Queen Anne’s lace look like itself.
Wild carrot is not a flower anyone plants. It is a flower no one fully manages to get rid of, either. It comes up in road margins, in fencerows, in pastures, in unkempt corners of every vineyard I have ever monitored, and it stays. In the Willamette Valley it is one of the most reliable late-summer bee plants on the landscape, which is why so much of our work at Trisaetum has been about leaving it alone. The mower can be a tremendously expensive way to throw away a meal.
I pressed this flower on a south-facing rise of Trisaetum Winery’s Ribbon Ridge vineyard in the Willamette Valley of Oregon — the same property that, on the day I made the press, was alive with the very bee in the print beside it.
The Bees
The bee on this print is Apis mellifera, the western honey bee — the bee most of us picture when we hear the word. She is not native to North America; her ancestors arrived in 1622 with European colonists in Virginia, in skeps lashed to the decks of ships, and she has been part of this continent’s working landscapes ever since. She is the only bee in North America that lives in large, perennial colonies, the only one that produces stored honey at scale, and the only one whose colonies are routinely moved across the country in trucks to pollinate the crops that feed us.
Honey bees are also generalists. Where a bumble bee may favor a deep keel flower and a small sweat bee may favor a shallow open one, a honey bee will work just about anything — and Queen Anne’s lace, with its flat-topped umbel of hundreds of tiny accessible flowers, is exactly the kind of plant she loves. A single honey bee on a single umbel can graze a hundred individual flowers in a few minutes without ever moving more than a body length.
On the August day this image was made at Ribbon Ridge, I wrote in my field notebook: “Queen Anne’s lace is covered in honey bees — this is a goal of the vineyards, to have honey bees going from the oaks into the vineyards.” The note is small and it is the whole story. The oak woodland along the edges of the Trisaetum property is the closest thing to wild forage that this vineyard offers an apiary. The vineyard itself, until we started planting flowers and leaving them alone, was offering very little. Queen Anne’s lace, growing freely along the roadways and the swales and the under-vine margins of Ribbon Ridge, has become one of the bridges — a flowering corridor that draws honey bees out from the oaks and into the rows, and back again. The print you are holding is a single frame of that bridge in action.
She is also surrounded, on this property, by company. Across four field seasons we have documented 44 species of bees at Trisaetum — six bumble bee species, two of them IUCN Vulnerable; a handful of specialists; a rare, newly described Oregon mining bee. Honey bees are part of that community on this vineyard, not all of it. But on a hot August afternoon, she’s the star on a Queen Anne’s lace umbel.
The Process
The “cyanotype” process was developed by British astronomer and chemist Sir John Herschel in 1842. It’s a photographic process that uses iron salts to create a deep blue image. Initially developed for reproduction of his own scientific notes and drawings, it was popularized by his friend, Anna Atkins, a botanist who published a book illustrated with photographs using the cyanotype process, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
My attraction to cyanotype printing may be related to my affinity for the scientific method. Though the subject of each piece is steeped in story and complexity, the image itself cannot be manipulated by perception. It simply is a print of simple reality.
This is the hook. As humans, we crave simplicity.
But agriculture is not simple, it’s complicated, complex, and contextual.
The striking cyan-blue entices the viewer to the piece and then invites a deeper inquiry.
I hope each viewer makes the journey to my website to learn about Bee Regenerative’s work with bees on agricultural landscapes and also where to connect with me as I travel around the country speaking on the beautifully complicated connections between bees, bison, cattle, ourselves and everything in-between.
The Work
Trisaetum Winery and Bee Regenerative have been collaborating on the Bee Friendly Vineyards program since 2019. The collaboration started with a question from James Frey, Trisaetum’s co-founder and winemaker: what if bees can make a better wine?
James’s thesis is that a wine is an expression of place — that the microbiology of the place, the wild yeasts and bacteria and fungi that live on grape skins and in the soil and on every leaf in the vineyard, is what gives a wine its character. And his hunch was that bees and the other flitting, flying insects that move through a vineyard might be part of how those microbes get distributed and stirred. They are pollen-dusty, they are honey-sticky, they touch every flower; they might, he suspected, be doing some of the work of dusting up the microbial community that ultimately ends up in the bottle. I added a corollary: above-ground floral diversity drives below-ground microbial diversity, and a richer microbiome in the soil should show up, eventually, in the fruit. A possible win for the bees, a possible win for the grapes, a possible win for the wine.
Trisaetum had just joined 1% for the Planet and could have simply written a check. Instead, James and I built a multi-season, data-informed project together. I collected bees and flowers. James tracked the wine. Dr. Jenifer Walke, a honey bee microbiologist at Eastern Washington University, helped think through the microbiome thread. The vineyard’s management decisions were shaped by what we learned along the way: wildflower seedings along fencerows and headlands and swales; reductions in chemical inputs; reduced or eliminated tillage in and around the rows; less mowing; cover crops chosen to bloom in the windows when the wild flora wasn’t.
Over four field seasons (2020–2023), the project documented 44 species of native bees across Trisaetum’s Coast Range and Ribbon Ridge vineyards. At the bottom of the Ribbon Ridge property, near the barn, an underground seep keeps a small swale alive into the dry weeks of summer; over the course of the project it has become one of the most reliable pollinator hotspots on the property, where Queen Anne’s lace, calendula, chicory, bachelor’s button, and California poppy all bloom and re-bloom in succession and the bee activity is dense enough to hear it before you see it. James himself, watching the property change as the tillage and the mowing receded, commented one fall that the soil seemed to be holding more water — that the project, in its quietest way, was making the vineyard more resilient.
Your support of this card supports that work, and the broader Bee Friendly Vineyards program — at Trisaetum and at the growing roster of partner vineyards across Oregon and beyond. We believe a vineyard can be an ecological refuge. The bees, when given the chance, agree.