MOST of us would recognise a bee if we saw one – but did you know the UK has 270 different bee species?

As well as honey bees, we have all sorts of bumble bee, masonry bee and mining bee, each with its own lifestyle, dining habits and territory. This variety, and the little most of us know about our wealth of bees, was the inspiration behind an exhibition at the Richard Jefferies Museum in Swindon.

Artist Lydia Needle, from Somerton in Somerset, works in wool and takes her inspiration from the natural world and environmental issues. In her exhibition Fifty Bees, she has created a variety of British bees using wool and embroidery and these have inspired a further 50 artists to create works in response to her bees.

“I was always into animals, since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and I thought that if we don’t know about bees, we can’t help fight for them. That’s where the idea came from.”

Her beautiful needlefelt bees are held within 50 tiny containers. Like tiny treasures, they are sewn into little tins, old match holders and antique velvet jewellery boxes. They are created to represent accurately the appearance of the different species of bee, and both the medium and the skill in their execution invite fascination and a desire to study them in detail. In this respect, they resemble the natural history collections of insects you might find in a museum or impaled with a pin in the Victorian amateur naturalist’s glass case – except that no bee gave its life for these displays. They are made from wool and embroidery thread, embellished with shining vintage Kamibari gold thread.

“I was in the garden working on another project about sea plastics and sea waste. I was reading something about the solitary bee and I thought that was interesting. I got a bee book and was struck by the complexity and consequences of the bees’ different lifestyles and how they are all linked to everything else, and how they are linked to us and us to them, and how it is all interconnected,” Lydia said.

This was two years ago, when Lydia turned 50, and she decided to use this prompt and moment to begin her Fifty Bees project. She learnt more about bees and how they lived in different habitats and landscapes around the country.

“That was my starting point, but I couldn’t have an exhibition that was just the bees. That didn’t tell you enough. So each bee has a corresponding piece of work that says more about it.”

The companion artists have each selected a bee and used it as inspiration for a piece of art in a whole variety of styles and media. The exhibition started off in Somerton, where 50 artists responded to the 50 bees, and now in Swindon, a second group of artists has created new works to accompany each of the bees.

“Last year I invited a few people, then put out an open call on social media,” Lydia said. “The work might be about the flowers the bees feed in, the places they live, the ecosystems. You learn so much more and go away knowing more about what you can do in your garden or landscape.”

Lydia has been an artist in wool for around five years and describes it as her new passion.

She was a textiles teacher in a secondary school and started learning how to do needle-felting while still teaching.

“It was love at first stab,” she said. “It was a feeling like coming home, when you finally find your thing.”

One of her fellow artists at the Fifty Bees exhibition is Susie Simmons, from Purton. Her bee is the beautifully named shiny margined mini mining bee.

“It’s a tiny little bee,” she said. “I went out with journals to places I thought there might be bees, in meadow flowers. I made notes and pictures – I was going to make a book originally. But the environment is so fragmented and vulnerable, I tore the journal and then pinned little pieces on a board.”

Joy Merron, who lives near Bruton, took inspiration from the red-thighed bee, which she said was a cuckoo bee, a parasite on other bees. She used her background in textiles to create a pile of small nesting cushions embroidered with the geometry of the bees’ lives.

Textile artist Rachel Leach created a work in response to the bear-clawed nomad bee, which burrows into sand, while Polly Hughes used altered postcards to respond to the newly discovered downed furrow bee.

“This strikes a chord with a lot of people,” Polly said. “They come out with all sorts of new knowledge. It really opened up a huge interest for me.”

Fifty Bees: the Interconnectedness of All Things runs till June 24 at the Richard Jefferies Museum, in Marlborough Road. Visit richardjefferies.org or lydianeedle.com.