The Power of Honey: Food, Finance and the Golden Age of Fraud is a free exhibition at the Bank of England Museum, open now until 28 August, exploring honey, money and the hidden mechanics of deception.
There is a live beehive inside the Bank of England Museum. This is not a metaphor.
The Power of Honey, created by experience designers Bompas & Parr, is a free summer exhibition that has installed a working colony of live bees into the heart of one of the most secure financial institutions in the world, and then drawn a line connecting the ways bees detect fraud to the ways the Bank of England does. It’s the kind of curatorial premise that sounds like it shouldn’t work and absolutely does.
What’s in the exhibition
The four strands running through the show are as surprising as the central concept. The first is the global epidemic of honey fraud: the adulteration of honey with cheaper syrups is one of the most widespread food crimes in the world, extraordinarily difficult to detect and worth billions in illegal revenue annually. The question of whether you could tell real honey from fake is harder to answer than you’d expect, and the exhibition lets you try.
The second strand explores how bees themselves communicate and protect the hive from threats, using complex signalling systems that have direct parallels to how financial institutions monitor and flag suspicious activity. The waggle dance, it turns out, is not entirely unlike an early warning system.
The third is the Bank of England’s own history of fraud detection: visitors can investigate banknotes under ultraviolet light and explore the sophisticated anti-counterfeiting measures built into every note in circulation. The Bank has been fighting counterfeiting since its founding in 1694, and the methods have evolved considerably since then.
The fourth is the live beehive itself, visible in the museum, a working colony that makes the exhibition genuinely unlike anything else on offer in the City this summer.
Why it’s worth going
The Bank of England Museum is one of those London institutions that gets overlooked precisely because it sounds dry. It isn’t. The collection includes gold bars you can actually lift, a reconstruction of an 18th-century banking hall and one of the best explanations of how money actually works in the city that created the modern financial system. The Power of Honey adds something genuinely unexpected on top of that, and it’s completely free.
The London x London Take: A working beehive in the Bank of England asking questions about fraud, food and financial systems is exactly the kind of free London experience that rewards curiosity. Go for the bees, stay for the banknotes under UV light.
Need to Know
- Where: Bank of England Museum, Bartholomew Lane, London EC2R 8AH
- When: Open now until 28 August 2026
- Hours: Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm
- Price: Free, no booking required
- Nearest tube: Bank (Central and Northern lines)
