Many is the second piece in my Bee, Honeycomb and Oneness Series, an ongoing body of work exploring the geometry of the hive and what bees can teach us about belonging to something larger than ourselves.
Every panel in the series shares the same honeycomb structure, held within a golden woven border. Inside the hexagons, each piece becomes its own world. In this drawing, the cells are small and the colony is full, with about twenty-five bees moving through warm shades of raspberry, dusty rose, magenta, violet, and plum. The patterns inside the cells draw on a shared visual language of spirals, circles, waves, dots, chevrons, and seeds, the kinds of marks people have made all over the world for thousands of years. Some cells are left open like rests in music, and some patterns flow from one cell into the next. A few bees are only partly seen, clipped by the edges, as if the colony keeps going beyond the frame.
Bees have been honored across cultures as symbols of community, cooperation, abundance, and the sacred connection between all living things. Each bee is small, and together they build something extraordinary. Many is a meditation on the strength of the collective and on how every individual makes it more beautiful.