BURT’S BEES GLOBAL HQ
Durham, NC
Corporations are Hives of People
Initially, I had some trepidation about painting bees on the side of Burt’s Bees Global Headquarters - the historic Hill Building at the American Tobacco Campus in downtown Durham, NC. I was invited to paint a mural for their annual culture day to honor the passing of the company’s founder, Burt Schavitz. I loved the idea of it, but I was worried that if I did a project with a bee-related company as big as Burt’s Bees, The Good of the Hive would forever be perceived as something Burt’s Bees founded. I was also concerned that they are owned by Clorox corporation. I was very new to the idea of activism and environmental issues. I was learning as I went along and this scale made me nervous I was expanding beyond what I could control. It is not a coincidence that the image I chose to portray is a swarm.
The Good of the Hive is an unfolding piece of art. It is not something being rolled out. These are very different modes of operating. I do not always know what is going to happen. I have always learned by experience. As I was debating whether I should do the project or not, I reached out to a very wise woman for advice. She reminded me that corporations are just hives of people. She told me that if we shut any group out of the healing process, especially large corporate groups, we are shutting out more than we think. She asked me to think about not just the people working at the company, but also the families that are taken care of by the people that worked at the company. In the end, the Burt’s Bees team really helped me understand a lot about the way corporate America works… and I made some lifelong friends in the process.
The Process
During Burt’s Bees annual Culture Day, four hundred Burt’s Bees employees from the factory workers to the General Manager, painted a petal of one of the flowers. The whole day was about coming together. Thank you to The Goodmon Family for allowing us to paint on their beautiful building. The mural is one of several in the series that will be about the swarm.
The Swarm
The swarm is an incredible, natural behavior of a healthy honeybee hive. It is often perceived as something aggressive and terrifying, but nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, it is one of the most elegant and sublime experiences in the natural world. The bees place themselves and their precious queen in an extremely vulnerable position for the possibility of growth. It is the natural expansion of a healthy, thriving, hive. It is an amazing example of the bees acting as one mind or super-organism.
The swarm is also a symbol of a new beginning.
A New Beginning
Burt Schavitz’s first bees were ones he collected from a swarm that landed in his yard in Maine. By simply appearing, the bees inspired a business. Burt is quoted as saying, “It wasn’t as if I’d summoned these bees down, or gone looking for them. It was an act of God. It was a no-brainer. Now I had a way of making some money. I had all of the tools and the knowledge, the literature, the ability to do just as my guru had done.” An age-old relationship of man to bee was honored. He had done the work to learn how to keep bees, and then the bees appeared.
Bees to the Minds of Millions
The Good of the Hive is never about any one man or woman. It is about all of us connecting around the issue of a declining bee population and doing what we can to heal our relationship with pollinators and the world around us. But with that said, there are few people that have done what Burt Schavitz did in his lifetime. In his humble and peculiar way, he brought honey bees directly into the minds and homes of millions of people around the world… and that is a very good thing.
