Artist Matthew Willey’s bee mural graces the entrance to the Ape House at the National Zoo. (Photo by Jacob Fenston/WAMU)

If you’ve gone to visit the extremely cute baby gorilla at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in the past few weeks, you may have noticed a man on a ladder using tiny brushes to slowly, painstakingly paint hundreds of giant bees around the entrance to the Great Ape House.

Why?

“Why? The question is what makes art so powerful,” explains muralist Matthew Willey, taking a break from painting on a chilly morning. “I wanted it to have that element of surprise, when you turn the corner and you see the bees first now.”

The zoo commissioned Willey to paint the mural as part of a new focus on the importance of pollinators — there’s also a recently opened bee-themed playground for kids. Willey says zoo staff showed him four potential locations for the bee mural, including next to the bee playground.

“It’s just the obvious answer,” he says.

But he didn’t like obvious. The last option staff showed him was the Brutalist concrete building that houses gorillas and orangutans. Willey says when he read the sign over the entrance, “Great Ape House,” he saw the Italian word for bee — ape. “This is obviously where we’re going to paint,” he thought. It wasn’t just that Italian word that attracted him. He also loved the architecture. “It’s pretty stoic. It’s just slabs of concrete just asking to be painted on.”

Matthew Willey, at work on several hundred bees adorning the Great Ape House. His goal is to paint 50,000 in total, all across the country. (Photo by Jacob Fenston/WAMU)

Willey has spent the past three and a half years painting huge bees in murals all over the country. His goal is to paint a total of 50,000 bees — so far he’s painted about 4,800 in 21 murals. He’s still got roughly 45,000 bees to go.

“The idea of it is not to hurry,” he says. “The whole idea of it is to take an arc of time,” because, he says, the problems facing bees aren’t going away any time soon.

Pollinators have been in decline for decades, due to loss of habitat and plants they need to survive, as well as pesticide use and diseases. Humans rely on bees for food; honeybees add some $15 billion to the U.S. economy according to the department of agriculture.

Willey builds his mural one bee at a time. (Photo by Jacob Fenston/WAMU)

The mural on the ape house illustrates a swarm of bees — when a colony gets too big for its home and splits up, setting off with a queen to find a new place to build a hive. The queen can be clearly seen near the Ape House roof (unlike in a real swarm, where other bees would cover her for protection).

Willey hopes his murals will get more people thinking about bees and their importance. “I hope people start to see how beautiful they are. What people find beautiful, they take care of.”

This story originally appeared at WAMU.