beecoming home

year 4

We collaborate with artists and honeybees to create amazing sculptures to raise awareness and funding for our mission: To help turn our urban spaces into a native pollinator sanctuary.

In 4 years we have:

collaborated with 39 individual artists

created 50 unique sculptures

Shown in 3 galleries, and 1 museum (the Columbus Museum of Art)

raised over $29,000 towards pollinator conservation work

Creating Change Through Art and Nature

Beecoming home aims to provide a space where art, community, and nature can sit and talk a while. So much of our daily lives have become disconnected from nature — from our commute to work in individual cars, to our sterile and uniform lawns, to the way we speak about ourselves as separate from the animal kingdom. We aim to unite culture and ecology in a thought- provoking, inter-species collaboration and facilitate an open and curious dialogue that invites everyone to the table. Beecoming Home invites artists from across the globe to collaborate with an unexpected creative partner: honey bees. To raise awareness and funding for pollinator habitat.

We started the  “beecoming home” project in 2022  in order to raise awareness about pollinator decline, use our platform to elevate artist’s voices,  and to raise funding to support the establishment of  pollinator habitat in urban environments. 

• Dr. Sarah Scott is an entomologist and research scientist  working to understand drivers of bee decline and improving wild bee welfare currently based at Newcastle University. She obtained her PhD from The Ohio State University researching the impacts of urban stressors on bee health and success.

• Luke Howard is the founder of the bee collective, an organization dedicated to supporting pollinators through outreach, education, habitat establishment, and art. He has been a beekeeper and artist for 9 years and has continued to push the boundaries and conversations on pollinators, community, and what it means to be part of your environment.

Our goals for this project are: 

1.  To inspire curiosity, conversation, and action to protect pollinators

2. Provide artists a platform to explore new, interspecies creative possibilities 

3. Create and sustain habitats for bees and other beneficial organisms

4. Educate the community on the importance of our native pollinators, their unique habits, and ways we can support them

5.  Unite culture and nature to show how vibrant and livable our world becomes when we connect more intentionally with the creatures around us   

On the concept of home:

We must give standing to the new pioneers, the homecomers bent on the most important work for the next century - a massive salvage operation to save the vulnerable but necessary pieces of nature and culture and to keep the good and artful examples before us. It is time for a new breed of artists to enter front and center, for the point of art, after all, is to connect. This is the homecomer I have in mind: the scientist, the accountant who converses with nature, a true artist devoted to the building of agriculture and culture to match the scenery presented to those first European eyes.”

- Wes Jackson

With gratitude,

luke howard and sarah scott

beekeeper@beethecollective.com

614.300.0176