MILAN, Italy (AFP) – The World Expo in Milan is abuzz about a giant aluminum hive that hums in harmony with 40,000 bees making honey 870 miles (1,400km) away in Nottingham, England.

Artist Wolfgang Buttress’s innovative work is the centerpiece of a bee-themed British pavilion that is pulling in nearly four times as many visitors as anticipated and has become one of the must-sees of the six-month world fair in Italy’s economic capital.

Steve Jewlitt-Fleet, the pavilion’s deputy director, told AFP that, since its May 1 opening, over 500,000 visitors have come to admire a creation designed to highlight the importance of bees to the environment and showcase scientific research that could help reverse an alarming decline in their numbers.

“It’s been a real word-of-mouth success,” said Jewlitt-Fleet.

Visitors to the pavilion follow the dance of a bee through British orchard and meadow landscapes featuring native apple trees and wild heather, buttercups and sorrel, before arriving at Buttress’s hive.

As they enter the 43-ton structure, they start to pick up the amplified hum of the bees in Nottingham Trent University physicist Martin Bencsik’s experimental hive in England, where he is using accelerometer technology borrowed from high-tech engineering to monitor what is going on inside.

Accelerometers are highly sensitive devices used to monitor vibrations in rotating machinery, notably in the automobile and aviation industries.

Now mass produced for use in smartphones (they allow automated portrait/landscape display functions) Bencsik uses them to track the evolution of vibrations within the hive over days, weeks and months and translates them as changes of the colony status.

By ANGUS MACKINNON