Back in Action

I've been very neglectful of my bee nice project for the past six months. My intentions were to have done so much more by this point in the year, but life happens and other important things needed my attention more than this. However, I'm happy to say that yesterday I was out and about and performed my first 'in person' bee nice act!

I drove over to a local grocery store and got a $5.00 gift card, slipped a bee nice card in with it, and put it on the windshield of one of the cars in the lot. I really wanted to stick around to see the reaction of the person when they saw the card, so I drove a few lanes over in the parking lot, parked in a spot where I could see the car, and waited.

With each person that came out of the store and walked in the general direction of the car, my heart did a little pitter patter of excitement. I was really looking forward to the right person walking out! Finally, a woman pushing a big cart full of groceries headed straight for the car. I watched her as she loaded up her trunk, pushed the empty grocery cart back to the cart corral, walked back to her car, and got in to the driver's seat. As quickly as the door closed, it opened back up, as she got out of the car to figure out what was on her windshield. She stood opened it up and I could see that she was looking at the gift card and at the bee nice card, front and back. After looking at it for a bit of time, she got back in the car, and that was that!

I wasn't close enough to her to really see what her reaction was, but I hope that it was happy surprise. I know that I was happy to be doing something nice for her - even though I had never seen her before, and probably never will again.

To the woman in the parking lot (if you happen to be curious enough about the bee nice card that you log onto this blog), I hope I was able to brighten your day just a little bit and that you will do something similarly random and nice for someone else!

bee

Happy Bee

I've received a handful of really wonderful responses from people who either received a bee nice card, or have heard through word of mouth about the cards and my project, and I am just so happy.

When I started this project and sent out the first 50 cards, as I dropped the envelopes in the mailbox, (this may sound silly) I felt a little bit giddy.  I was so excited to think about everyone opening up their mail and having this unexpected little surprise.  And I have to say, that with each email I've received and each comment that I've read here on the blog, it feels like my heart is growing bigger and bigger. 

Thank you to every one of you!  I'm so happy to hear your stories.  Please keep them coming!

Did you receive a bee nice card? Comment here!

It's been a couple of weeks now since I sent out the first 50 bee nice cards.  One card was sent to a random household in each of the 50 US states.  So far only four have come to the blog to let me know that they've received their card.  I can't deny that I'm a little sad that more people didn't respond, but I just hope that maybe they will pass along the bee nice card to someone else and that with time we'll get some comments and responses here on the blog.

Thanks to the people from Alaska, New Mexico, Ohio, and South Dakota for letting me know! 

Just a reminder that you can comment anonymously!  Or if you prefer, don't hesitate to email me at beenicecard@gmail.com .

Have a great day!

"bee nice" USA begins!

I found out that today is Random Act of Kindness Day.  What a perfect day to send out the first 50 bee nice cards!  It was a lot of work to get it all done, but I've got a card for one household in each of the 50 states ready to go out in the mail! 


If you've received your card and you've stopped by this blog, let me know by leaving a comment below.  This site is meant to be completely anonymous, but if you can leave your city and state and a little bit of information about what nice thing was done for you, and/or what nice thing you're going to do for someone else, that would be so great!  It'll be fun to track all the places that the 'bee nice' cards travel to.

bee nice is born

I received some money for my birthday at the beginning of this year, and instead of going out and spending it on myself, I decided that I wanted to use it to do random nice things for other people.  I came up with this ‘bee nice’ idea when I was at the drive-thru one morning, waiting for my coffee.  I thought, ‘wouldn’t it be nice to just pay the bill for the person behind me?’  I wondered if I did something randomly nice for them, if they in turn would do something randomly nice for someone else that day, and if the chain of nice acts would continue on and on. 

Over the next few days, I came up with the idea that with each nice act that I did for someone, I would anonymously leave them a little note asking that they, in turn, do something anonymously nice for someone else.  That’s when I decided to design a little card that could be passed along from person to person.  I sent the design off to the printer, and the bee nice card was born!

I decided that I could potentially track a bunch of these random acts of kindness on this blog, by having people come here to anonymously post about what nice things were done for them, or what nice things they did for someone else.

At first, I thought that I would just start this whole experiment locally.  Then I had another idea.  I decided that I would look up 50 random addresses across the country (one from each state) and mail them each a $2.00 gift card just to brighten their day.  I used Google maps to find out what stores were nearby these 50 households.  I quickly noticed that there are a whole lot of Panera Bread locations across this country!  There are also lots of Dunkin’ Donuts.  Then there are some locations that don’t seem to have anything nearby.   

So that’s going to be my first random act of kindness.  I’ve ordered up gift cards from Panera Bread, Dunkin’ Donuts and Amazon.com.  Once they come in, I’ll mail them out and hopefully I’ll get some responses from the recipients.  I know that $2.00 isn’t a lot of money these days, but hopefully these people can enjoy a nice cup of coffee, or some sort of treat on my dime.  (I’m not wealthy by any means, so I had to work within the budget of the birthday money that I received.)

I am not asking anyone to disclose any information about themselves on this site, other than perhaps where in the country they are located, so that we can see where all the bee nice cards are traveling to.  I will post again once I’ve dropped the first bee nice cards in the mail!