Wearing yellow shirts reading “Bee Kind” in solidarity with the Save the Bees movement, members of the Marshall University Campus Activities Board swarmed the Memorial Student Center plazaWednesday.

Emilie Christenberry, CAB’s community engagement chair, created an idea to get Marshall students involved while also saving the bees by allowing students to get a special bee tattoo for $30 during the event.

Partnering with the local tattoo shop Ink’d Revolution, Christenberry created a set up that benefitted students, bees and the tattoo shop.

“I gave them (the tattoo shop) a call, and they got back to me within a couple weeks,” Christenberry said. “So, half of the profits go to Ink’d Revolution and the other half go to the (Honey)bee Conservancy.”

The design, which was the result of a collaboration between CAB and the tattoo shop, was created to be easy for the tattooer and tattooee, while also being a design that everyone would want to get, Christenberry said.

Sydney Ankrom, vice president of CAB, who had not been tattooed previously, said she had been thinking about getting a tattoo for a while, but this occasion solidified her decision.

“I have been thinking about getting a tattoo for a while, and I think a tattoo that is also a donation to the Honeybee Conservancy sets my decision in stone,” Ankrom said.

In addition to tattoos, the event included free buttons, stickers, cookies and lemonade and provided an opportunity to raise awareness.

“I think that a lot of people, even though they may know bees are important, they don’t understand the seriousness of it— that we need to help protect them and that they are an endangered species,” Christenberry said. “It was really important to bring awareness to that and let people know that bees are one of the reasons we are alive. One in 3 bites of food you take is because of bees. It’s just the way the food chain works.”

At the end of the event, all of the food and refreshments were gone and approximately 200 people had received a bee tattoo.

Trey Delida can be contacted at [email protected].