About The Art of Mindful Beeing project

What is the purpose of The Art of Mindful Beeing? 

• To celebrate our wild bees and all our insects. 
• To help more psychiatrists to become interested in bees and more knowledgeable about insects and wildlife in general.
• To share information about nature-based therapies and their positive impact on wellbeing of psychiatrists and their patients.
• To raise awareness around clinical sustainability and the importance of biodiversity.
• To help psychiatrists and their teams to get actively involved in nature-based therapies and in making better habitats for bees and other pollinating insects.

Why bees?

• Most people like bees.
• They are (in insect terms!) fairly big, so easy for us and our patients to spot.
• They are (reasonably) easy to photograph.
• They are easy to identify – well, some of them are…
• There is a brilliant bee charity – the Bumblebee Conservation Trust - who are already involved in projects with mental health service users and staff. The Trust have an excellent website and lots of resources to help you learn.

For those who want to know more about nature, bees are a good place to start. We hope that through learning about bees, participants in the project might also want to learn about other groups of insects. 

How can I get involved?

• We’d like you to take a photograph of anything that looks like a bee (for help with bee identification, visit our resources section).
• Send us your photo via this submission form and note where it was taken (if possible with grid reference or What3Words location).
• Please include your best guess as to what species your bee is. Don’t worry if you see something and you’re not sure if it’s a bee or what sort of bee it is, just send us the photo and we will tell you what it is.
• We will curate an online gallery of all your wonderful photos. We also hope to produce an attractive online digital map to show the geographical distributions of individual species of bee.
• Use some of the resources to see if you can identify your bee and find out more about its life. By the end of the summer, we hope that you’ll know the differences between a bumblebee a solitary bee and a honeybee. We also hope that you’ll be able to identify five or six of common species of bee. 
• In the autumn, we will have an online event where we will share some of the most interesting photographs you have taken. There will be a talk celebrating the life of bees and a session on how to involve bees and other insects in nature-based therapy, and how to get you, your staff and patients) involved in insect conservation.