Dark, funny, and a little weird, The Apiary brings offbeat buzz to summer theatre scene
With live music and innovative touches, a collective of established Vancouver stage artists bring eco-horror play about disappearing bees to life at the Vines Den
Jasmine Chen in The Apiary.
The Apiary runs July 16 to 25 at the Vines Den. Sliding scale tickets range from $15 to $40.
SUMMER THEATRE OFTEN promises lighthearted entertainment. The Apiary other ideas.
Opening soon at the Vines Den, The Apiary is a darkly humorous, eco-horror play by Canadian playwright Kate Douglas, presented by the Apiary Collective, a group of professional Vancouver artists devoting their time to create an unconventional summer theatre experience. Set 22 years in the future, it follows Zora (Jasmine Chen), a new employee at an underfunded research facility caring for the world’s last remaining bees. There she joins longtime beekeeper Pilar (Christine Quintana), and together they discover a way to revive the struggling population, forcing them to grapple with the moral cost of saving a dying planet.
To Quintana, the world of The Apiary already feels surprisingly familiar.
“That’s how the world feels to me right now,” she says. “Anytime you open a newspaper or look at something that’s happening right now, you’re like, ‘Is that real? Am I seeing this? Is this the world that we’re living in right now?’”
The play gave the collective an opportunity to stay creative during the summer, while also offering audiences something a little “freaky”—from the way The Apiary conjures bees through live music to the way it takes a trip into a hive. Formed by artists volunteering their time, the collective wanted to stage a production that felt both entertaining and relevant to the world outside the theatre.
But The Apiary is not all doom and gloom. Alongside its darker themes, the play finds humour in the relationships between the characters and its satire of corporate responses to environmental crises. Quintana says the laughs often catch audiences offguard before giving way to more uncomfortable questions.
“I love that it’s very dark, but it’s also very funny and it’s very weird,” she says.
Quintana believes summer is an especially fitting time to stage the play, when carefree afternoons increasingly come with concerns about extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and the changing climate.
Christine Quintana
“Summer is a time that I feel very aware of climate change,” she says. “Along with all the happy things of beach time and riding my bike around, I also feel a sense of dread about how hot it’ll get, if it’ll be smoky. This play offers this venue to be like, yes, what’s happening right now isn’t normal.”
One of the production’s most distinctive elements is the live musical soundscape. For a story centred on the world’s last remaining bees, keeping them offstage was never really an option. Jessie Award–winning multidisciplinary violinist Molly MacKinnon embodies them using violin, looping technology, and effects pedals. As the music shifts between naturalistic buzzing and expansive soundscapes inspired by medieval choral music, the action leaves the laboratory behind and enters bee time, where audiences experience the world from inside the hive.
“Kate Douglas was very specific in her writing about how the bees have to be present in the show in some way,” MacKinnon says. “They can’t just be referenced or put into the sound design in a more obscure way.”
Instead of simply accompanying the action, MacKinnon’s performance gives the bees a physical presence throughout the production, allowing them to emerge as characters in their own right.
The future imagined in The Apiary is less about science fiction than it is about examining questions that already shape everyday life, from climate anxiety to the ethical compromises people make in the name of progress.
Quintana hopes audiences leave after an evening that makes them laugh, reflect, and maybe even cry. “There’s a big question in the play of, ‘Is it time to just give up?’ And we are not at that point in 2026,” she says. “It’s not too late.” 
Jasmine Chen in The Apiary.
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