About Us
The Community Bee Clinic is a radical veterinary practice where visitors can become emergency caregivers for malnourished, hypothermic, and otherwise imperiled honey bees. Through interspecies nursing care, participants are invited to engage and connect with non-human bodies in new ways. The clinic's unique honeybee-nursing protocol was developed by its founding director in collaboration with the Nieh Lab at the University of California San Diego, where the health, environmental stressors, and communication of social bees are studied.
The overarching mission of the clinic is to train attentiveness and care toward non-human bodies through moments of agency, urgency, and intimacy. Performing such acts of care teaches us to be attentive to the flesh and blood vulnerability of other beings—whether human or not. At the Community Bee Clinic, we believe that the only way to begin the fight against global environmental degradation, pollinator decline, and biodiversity loss is through the cultivation of personal engagement and emotional investment.
We believe that every single individual life matters, no matter how small!
This interdisciplinary, speculative project has been awarded a Russell Foundation grant and received additional support from the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego and the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination. The pop-up clinics have also been installed in art and performance spaces, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Other Places Art Fair.
If you have any questions or want to get involved with the project, feel free to reach out at communitybeeclinic@gmail.com.
About the Staff
Lisa Korpos
Founding Director, Primary Bee Care Physician
Lisa Korpos MFA, is the Founding Director of the Community Bee Clinic and the developer of the honeybee resuscitation protocol, which has been used to rescue and prolong the lives of hundreds of bees around Southern California. Korpos is an interdisciplinary researcher who conducts investigations into animal perception, interspecies meaning-making, and the aesthetics of vulnerability. Her research reveals non-human subjectivity, parsing out the common threads that weave us all together as embodied creatures. Existing between the biological sciences, contemporary art, and public engagement, her projects are dependent upon collaboration with others—both human and non-human. From rats to dolphins to honeybees, these projects invariably feature nonhuman subjects and collaborators, who co-create the content of the work through embodied interaction. These works are often also developed collaboratively with scientists in laboratory or field-research contexts, and Korpos has an established record of collaborations with scientific researchers and institutions. Korpos holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Department of Visual Arts at UC San Diego with an emphasis in Speculative Design, along with two baccalaureate degrees in Studio Art and Cognitive Science. Her published master's thesis details the research, development, and history of the Community Bee Clinic.