As an artist, she brings that belief to life through meticulously detailed oil and pastel paintings that celebrate the intricate beauty of Australia’s native bees. 

This month, her first solo exhibition, NATIVE: An Exhibition of Australian Bees, will showcase paintings inspired by the native bees in her garden and photographs from the Wheen Bee Foundation’s Pollinator Photography Competition at The Store Room in Toowoomba. 

Anne wants to create a truly exquisite exhibition that honours bees. 

“Bees are magic pieces of creation,” Anne said. “You don’t want to fudge it. The colours have to be right; the hairs have to be perfect.” 

The collection of eight paintings magnifies native bees to a scale rarely seen, inviting visitors into a whole new world. 

Anne’s fascination with native bees began more than a decade ago when gardening became a place of solace during a stressful period in her life. 

One summer afternoon, while watering her garden, she noticed an unfamiliar insect hovering around a pot of native water reeds. 

“At first I thought it was a fly, but on closer inspection I saw it had blue stripes. I googled what I’d just seen and discovered the blue-banded bee, and from there it all snowballed.” 

Since that first encounter, Anne has identified 13 species of native bees in her small suburban garden, transforming an ordinary backyard into a source of comfort and inspiration. 

“It’s not simply painting the bees to make a buck, it’s a genuine love.” 

For Anne, the goal is to produce a body of work with meaning and legacy, while encouraging a deeper care for bees.  

Anne is a self-taught artist who balances her work as a carer.  

“I hope the show encourages people to slow down, notice the natural world and value the creatures around them,” she said 

“Noticing and loving bees changes the whole way you look at an outdoor space. 

“I now look at gardens and think about how I can make them more useful and habitable.” 

That shift is visible in her own backyard, where she creates small pockets of habitat for native bees, including planting cosmos flowers along her driveway each spring and leaving them to dry out, providing leaf cover and shelter for burrowing bees during November and December. 

She encourages people to put the herbicides and pesticides away and think carefully about how they can support pollinators in their own patch of the world. 

“Micro-level change and moments of interest can create huge paradigm shifts.” 

For Anne, curiosity about the natural world is something people are all born with, but many people lose it along the way. 

“Look at children. We start in the world with such wonder, and slowly it is dulled,” Anne said. “It’s not normal to stop being obsessed with the details of our natural world. 

“We’re the normal ones.” 

NATIVE: An Exhibition of Australian Bees will be on display at The Store Room in Toowoomba on Sunday, 20 September 2026. Find out more about the exhibit here. Learn more about Anne Scanlon here.  

The exhibition features paintings inspired by entries from the Wheen Bee Foundation’s Pollinator Photography Competition. The 2026 competition is now open, inviting Australians to share their own photographs celebrating the diversity and beauty of the nation’s pollinators. Learn more and enter here.