Matthew Willey - The Good of the Hive
I painted my first mural for The Good of the Hive in 2015. But the idea was inspired years earlier, in 2008, by a chance encounter with a honeybee on the floor of my studio in NYC. She landed in the middle of the rug and was moving slowly so I had an opportunity to get down on the floor with this little bee and really study her. I had never noticed the puppy-like cuteness in a bee before. It was the fuzziness, the big eyes and antennae that did it. In the 2 hours that we spent together, I connected with her.
After she died, I put her out in my backyard, came back in and started researching honeybees online. I came across Colony Collapse Disorder almost immediately, which was a huge mystery back then. Millions of bees were dying all over the world and nobody knew why. I remember thinking “How have I not heard anything about this?” I got even more curious and started looking at the behaviors of bees when I came across ‘altruistic self-removal from the hive.’ If a bee feels sick and they are in the hive, they will exit and fly off into the abyss for ‘the good of the hive.’ This fascinated me. It’s where the name of the project came from in 2015. Honeybees take this drastic action because they are hard wired to understand that their immune system is collective. In other words, they experience their health as based on the health of the hive, not their individual bee body. This was a lightning bolt moment for me. I realized that our immune system is the same way, but we don’t act like it. The difference is that we are wired for choice, but they are wired for change.
I had been painting murals for over 20 years at that point and so I decided to try and find a place to paint a mural about what was going on with bees. It took 7 years, but a friend finally reached out to me with a potential wall in LaBelle Florida. What was meant to be one mural to help raise some awareness launched a personal commitment to hand-paint 50,000 bees in murals around the world.
Nine years later, I have painted 54 murals and installations on four continents totaling nearly 11,000 bees. I partner with the communities and throw dance parties, concerts, movie nights, panel discussions, dinner parties and other types of events at mural sites to bring people together. I am working on the first feature documentary about the work and expanding the mission because of the success of the project.
I’ve spoken at the United nations, Smithsonian, MIT, Duke University and other schools and classrooms across the US and beyond.
“The bee is not bound by race, nationality, gender, age, religion or political affiliation – none of the things that separate us. Her essence is connection.” Matt Willey
The mission is to get people curious about the planet we live on through the lens of art bees and storytelling.