The Beehive’s mission:

In the process of this effort we seek to take the “who made that!?” and “how much does it cost!?” out of our creative endeavors, by anonymously functioning as word-to-image translators of the information we convey. We build, and disseminate these visual tools with the hope that they will self-replicate, and take on life of their own.

The Hivestory…
The work of the Beehive Collective has three major facets: the Hive is appreciated internationally for its educational graphics campaigns, at a regional level for it’s stone mosaic murals and apprentice program, and locally for it’s dedication to the revitalization of the Machias Valley Grange Hall, a landmark building in our small, rural town. The Hive has been going and growing since 2000, at full speed!

Organizational structure and composition…
We are rooted in rural Eastern Maine, but are a very decentralized swarm. There are usually six backbone bees at any given time, with a current count of fourteen total, and many other autonomous pollinators scattered throughout the Americas that have small pieces of the Beehive’s work integrated into their own individual activist efforts…. and countless other folks functioning as individual researchers and storytellers!

At this point in our evolution, our organism is entirely volunteer run. No one gets paid, but full-time bees have the expenses of room and board covered by the projects they are dedicated to. We have no queen, and make decisions by consensus process. The priorities for our work are set by the requests we receive from collaborators, audiences, and our advisory bees… aiming to stay flexible and organic enough to respond to current events, and mass-pollination opportunities.

Some examples of the busy bee metaphor:

---The Hive has now distributed over 75,000 posters, completely by hand (not sold in stores) over our few years of existence. Hooray for the grassroots!

---Each year, even while maintaining our goal to give over half of both our posters and lectures away for free, we raise 90% of our budget from operating purely on a donation basis! We attribute this strange miracle to the desperate need for more healthy, and visual representation of the complex and overwhelming issues our society is facing.

---Each year our little touring swarms present narrative picture-lectures at over 300 locations in the Western Hemisphere! All of these events are organized by grassroots, word of mouth, efforts!

The Hive’s work is often ambitious, overwhelming, organic, thrilling, effective, challenging, stressful and moving forward in ways we never never imagined. Us Bees are in the throes of an adventure that is constantly unfolding- consistently testing our own limits. So far, the return on that effort has been phenomenal, something you'd need to see to believe. We've learned to not take lightly the metaphor of busy bees or ants carrying fifty times their own body weight… our one guarantee for wannabees joining forces with our swarm: NEVER BORING!