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New Mural In Peterborough Raises Awareness of Bees

Daniela Allee
/
NHPR

Peterborough's community center is getting a bit of a makeover—with a honey bee mural.

It's part of a local group's effort to raise awareness about the role bees play in our food systems.

Each bee Matt Willey paints is about 3 feet long. By the time he's done, there'll be 200 on this wall.

"It's amazing to me how many people I meet don't even know what a pollinator is,” he said.

That's why he wants to paint 50,000 bees around the world, and why Peterborough's New Hampshire Honey Bee Initiative brought him here all the way from North Carolina.

For Willey, these murals help people connect with bees on a more personal level.

“When I paint bees, and say, ‘Aren't they cool?’ People go, ‘I never really thought about that,’” Willey said.

But then people come back to his mural to tell him they were staring at a bee in their yard for 10 minutes.

There’ll be a concert this Saturday at the mural to celebrate bees.

Daniela is an editor in NHPR's newsroom. She leads NHPR's Spanish language news initiative, ¿Qué Hay de Nuevo, New Hampshire? and the station's climate change reporting project, By Degrees. You can email her at dallee@nhpr.org.
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