Dewar's is marking the launch of their latest honey-infused whisky with a campaign that celebrates their indispensable partner: the humble honey bee.

Conceived by creative agency Sid Lee and produced by The Ebeling Group, the 3-B Printing Project partnered master beekeeper Robin Theron with Los Angeles based sculptor James Peterson and an 80,000-strong army of bees.

To overcome the bees' naturally inclination to build inwards, the team created an 'inside-out hive' by 3D printing a mold of outwardly facing hexagonal cells to imitate the honeycomb pattern produced by the bees in their natural environment. To further fortify their forgery, the team covered the faux-hive in real beeswax before enclosing the structure within a transparent plastic case. This afforded the team the rare opportunity to witness the bees at work in their most natural of states; indeed, the bees were fooled into producing sufficient wax to form solid sculptures, including a whisky bottle and a bust of the Dewar's Drinking Man.

The importance of bees in our ecosystem and to our overall survival is a hot-topic that we've explored before. Whilst there's no doubting it is an interesting way to launch a new product, it is not the first example of controlled beeswax production. Slovakian designer Tomáš Libertíny created The Honeycomb Vase in 2007, whilst his 2010 project The Unbearable Lightness employed a similar (though not exact) technique to that of the 3-B Printing Project.