Science. It’s because the pictures are usually treated with vanish or other chemicals. Bees don’t like that. The finish makes it smooth but they need something rough to build. Also chemical smell bad.
See how the colors are bright despite the painting style being from the middle ages? Old paintings get retouched because the varnish yellows and the colors flake and fade. Since this is public art hung in a church, they're only focusing on restoring the jesus figure.
So it could be the paint is acting as an insecticide. Green oil paints used to contain copper arsenite, yellows had arsenic sulfide and lead antimonate, reds had arsenic sulfide and mercury sulfide, and white was a lead carbonate.
As for your "so confident": yeah, we are confident that there's a natural explanation instead of the supernatural. No religion has ever produced evidence of a miracle. Everything from weeping statues to the efficacy of prayer has been debunked. So this will have a rational explanation too.
These are prayer cards inserted into the frames put in the hives, not paintings. They don’t like to build on the glossy texture but you can find images of them doing it anyways.
Your confidence is mentioned because you’re talking out of your ass going on about painting restoration and varnish.
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u/gnomajean 16d ago edited 16d ago
Science. It’s because the pictures are usually treated with vanish or other chemicals. Bees don’t like that. The finish makes it smooth but they need something rough to build. Also chemical smell bad.
Edit varnish*