Bee my honey !

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Buzz
• StumbleUpon
• Digg
• Delicious
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Technorati

This origami bee was born a fly!

A couple of years ago my friend Nancy Tschorn asked if I could fold half dozen origami bees to give as a gift to her twelve-year-old beekeeping grandson. My challenge was that the only origami bees I had seen were quite complex. Even if I could locate diagrams, making one complex bee would take me a while.

Making half a dozen bees seemed out of the question!

Fortunately, at that time I had been folding a fly created by Ángel Écija. With masterful simplicity this fly takes advantage of the white of one side of a piece of paper and black on the other.

Perhaps, I thought, this fly could become a bee…

After experimenting with the color of the paper and a tweak here and there with the wings and head, I found success!

I folded eight of these bees for Nancy. In return she gave me a large jar of delicious Vermont honey. Who would have thought that these paper bees would produce such great honey?

The following video shows how to make the fly, and what needs to be done to turn it into a bee. Grateful acknowledgment to Ángel Écija for granting permission to demonstrate his fly model in this video.

………………

by LEYLA TORRES on JULY 6, 2012

in Origami spirit