Situated on a rolling site that was farmsteaded in 1855 by Swiss immigrants, the Tashjian Bee and Pollinator Discovery Center is the first building in a planned “farm to table” campus at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum southwest of the Twin Cities. The University of Minnesota recently completed a state-of-the-art bee research facility on its St. Paul campus, but famed bee researcher Marla Spivak and University officials agreed that an outreach program about pollinators belonged at the arboretum.

macMonkey Digital Studios was tasked to create four interactive video screens plus five different iPad kiosks each displaying swipeable photos and videos on varying pollinator topics.

In the Driven to Discover video playback touchscreen, visitors choose any one of four University of Minnesota bee researchers and scientists, including famed bee researcher Marla Spivak, then select one of four unique questions pertaining to that scientist’s speciality.

Proceeding to the Diverse Bee Diverse Flowers touchscreen, guests choose different flowers on the screen to view a video showing the type of bee that it attracts.

The Hive Theater features a 50″ HDTV screen in its own theater-like space, controlled by four physically lit buttons, each offering a different video pertaining to honey bees and their life in hives.

Finally the Monarch Metamorphosis touchscreen displays a time-lapse video of the Monarch Butterflies incredible metamorphosis from caterpillar to its pollinating butterfly form.

Each custom iPad kiosk provides a different display of swipeable images or videos including Minnesota’s Wild Bees and Butterfly species, Honey Harvesting, Monarch Butterflies in Mexico, and Worker Bee Chores.

Project included creation of custom display code for the large touchscreen monitors, custom display and physical button integration for the large theater display and a custom HTML code for each iPad app.