Bees play an important role as the anchor of the pollinator world, responsible for pollinating about one-third of the food we eat and roughly 80 per cent of all flowering plants.
In the week of World Bee Day (May 20), Elmira’s BIA joined in on celebrating the bees with a free, all-ages colouring contest, which runs until June 12 and honours the downtown’s newest mural, “The Hive.”
“We’ve received some submissions so far, and we look forward to seeing more come in before the deadline,” said the downtown business group’s project lead, Dana Costello.
Colouring sheets can be picked up from local businesses, including Elmira Home Hardware, Market Cafe Elmira, Kitchen Kuttings, Elmira Branch- Region of Waterloo Library, Home Stretch Meat Market Elmira, and Local Renaissance. Participants can use any medium they want to colour their page, from crayons to pencils or paint.
There are four different colouring pages available, each showcasing a different section of the Hive mural. After completing the colouring page, participants can drop off their masterpiece directly at the site of the mural at 5 Church St. W. There is a black mailbox for the sheets, which will be picked up by the BIA’s worker bees.
The winner of the contest will receive “a collection of sweet treats from around downtown Elmira,” said Costello.
The Hive mural has brightened the downtown with its cheerful yellow backdrop and beautiful, intricate linework of bees and honeycombs. The downtown BIA lists the mural as a stop on Elmira’s downtown Art Walk, an accessible, year-round outdoor gallery featuring artists from the local community and across across Ontario. The Hive was made possible with funding from the FedDev grant, which aims to support and strengthen local businesses in southern Ontario.
“We applied for it in 2024, and the full application was actually to do the planter boxes in downtown Elmira,” explained Costello.
“There’s art on every single one of them, and they also have a QR code on each piece of work that will direct you to a video and article about the artist and about the piece of work.”
Once the planter boxes were finished, the Elmira BIA moved on to focus on the Hive mural, which completed the BIA’s one-kilometre art walk.
In early December 2025, during the Elmira Moonlight Madness event, the Hive mural was officially unveiled. The art director of Pellvetica, the artist group behind the mural’s design, Sandy Pell, explained that the idea for the mural came to her on a walk on a local trail near her home on Vancouver Island.
“They actually have honey bees and hives on their property, and we were talking about this mural, and I’m not even sure how it came about, but I kind of was noodling between different concepts, all the different directions that we could take,” said Pell.
“What we love about the idea of bees and hives, and the hive itself, is that every single bee that’s in a hive has a very particular job. Some are working, some are resting, some are building, some are working with each other, but they all represent a different moment that’s actually needed for the hive to operate.”
While Pell now lives with her husband on Vancouver Island, the couple previously spent many years in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, where they experienced Elmira’s sense of community firsthand.
“We spent a lot of time in the countryside, buying food from the local farmers’ markets and things. It was very common for us just to jump in the car and go to many of these small communities for the weekends, and just get away and, really, really get into the ground of where just some of these family-oriented moments were happening.”
Elmira’s sense of community made the bee the perfect mascot. When Pell brought the idea of the bee as the mural’s focus to Elmira’s BIA, Costello was thrilled.
“They came up with the concept of bees that live in colonies with many different workers side by side, and they all work together to make a beautiful home and a beautiful way of living, and we absolutely loved the concept,” said Costello.
Now living across the country, Pellvetica completed the project remotely, but each piece of the mural was still hand-drawn. They worked from a napkin sketch, a quick drawing usually jotted down on a piece of scrap paper like a napkin, and refined the drawing until they reached the detailed final piece.
“Everything that you see that’s printed on the vinyl is all drawn by hand,” said Pell, adding that the piece took upwards of 80 to a hundred hours of drawing time to perfect.
“Every single line on every single honeycomb, the black line itself is all hand-drawn, then all the colour applied in the background was all hand-drawn. It’s not just a digital job that’s one-and-done. An incredible attention to detail goes into every single bee and every single piece there.”
The challenges of doing a big art installation are something the team at Pellvetica have done before.
“It’s not our first rodeo, so we’ve done this before. What is really interesting about being an artist today is that if you can set yourself up with really high-quality suppliers, you really can work from anywhere. So, while you could paint the wall with paint on a ladder and do it the typical mural way, we are always trying to stretch our creative freedom as artists, to challenge ourselves to work on different types of pieces that we’ve never done before,” said Pell.
For Pell, adding a colouring challenge to engage the community with the mural enhances the project’s joy.
“In a world right now where so much is moving into the digital space, I think the more that we can keep kids creating and exploring and just playing with different tools and supplies and materials that they have available to them, it really helps build so many other aspects of life that keep you curious, and challenged,” said Pell.
“That’s like pure honey to my heart. It’s great if the mural can help inspire that in any way, we’re very pleased as artists to be part of that message for people.”
