By Adam Rabiner
Having worked as a beekeeper in the Central African Republic right after college as a Peace Corps volunteer, I know a fair amount about bees but still learned a lot from More Than Honey. The film makers flew around the world four times covering a lot of ground, literally and figuratively. Besides honey, topics include: modern western beekeeping in the U.S.A. vs. smaller scale examples in Europe; queen breeding; swarming and colony splitting, the respective roles of male drones and female workers; modern scientific studies on the brain and mind of a bee, as well as the intelligence of an individual bee vs. that of the collective hive; bee communication; bee diseases, including Colony Collapse Disorder; the role of bees (and humans in China) in pollination; and a lot more.
But as much as the film is a veritable fount of entomological information, what I found most astonishing about the movie was the cinematography, especially when paired with its soundtrack, the combination of which is simply jaw-dropping. Modern day film cameras capture bees, magnified hundreds of times so that they appear birdlike in size. The cameras get inside the inner recesses of a bee’s secret lair, showing her feeding a queen, molding a queen cell, emerging from one, or performing a waggle dance to convey the direction and distance of pollinating plants. Similarly, cameras capture a drone and queen in flight, mating in mid-air, the drone dropping to the ground dead from his sacrificial (and one would hope satisfying) act of procreation. Bees fly in was motion, and the world is seen from the bee’s point of view, as if a mini camera were mounted on her back. In one particularly sad closeup you see a bee, perched on an almond flower, being sprayed with fungicide. She clings to her branch withstanding this chemical shower, but eventually succumbs and falls to the ground.
Apart from this technical virtuosity, cinematographer Jörg Jeshel captures all the natural beauty of the Swiss Alps and Austria. Traditional beekeeper, Fred Jaggi, looks like he could be a character right out of The Sound of Music. A genial beekeeper, Fred did not want to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps because he did not wish to get stung, but decided, “I’m no sissy” only when his father told him he would sell the hives if there was no one to take over the family business. In an extremely sad and moving scene we watch Fred, who has just been told that his colony was infected with foul brood, set about gassing his bees, then sweeping their carcasses into a pit along with frames and other equipment and setting it all on fire, a devastating emotional and economic loss.
Fred’s counterpart is John Miller, owner of Miller Honey Farms in Newcastle, California. He too comes from a long line of beekeepers but while Fred has kept things more or less small-scale, John has followed the capitalist imperative to grow the family business so that everything is ten-fold the scale it was in prior generations: the costs, the power used, the inventory, the number of hives, trucks, distances travelled, output, etc. John still cares about the bees but admits that he probably does not have the same emotional connection to them that he once did or that earlier generations of Millers did. They are more of a commodity to him. And given the devastation wrought to his bees by Colony Collapse Disorder, it would be too painful to take their deaths too much to heart. For him, when listening to the buzzing of bees, he hears “the sound of money.”
Towards the end of the film, we are introduced to a third beekeeper, another American, Fred Terry. Unlike John Miller who is a stand-in for the straightlaced commercial bee-keeper businessman, Terry seems like more of a laidback Arizonan ex-hippy. He talks about getting to know and gain respect for the Africanized (killer) bees who escaped from a breeding experiment in Brazil many years ago eventually arriving at our borders. He likens the fear of these bees to Americans’ distrust and suspicion of “the other,” namely illegal aliens. He admires the ability of killer bees to survive and thrive under conditions that thwart the more mellow European bees he had been accustomed to working with and surmises that long after human beings are gone from this planet, “there will be bees.”
Having worked as a beekeeper in the Central African Republic right after college as a Peace Corps volunteer, I know a fair amount about bees but still learned a lot from More Than Honey. The film makers flew around the world four times covering a lot of ground, literally and figuratively. Besides honey, topics include: modern western beekeeping in the U.S.A. vs. smaller scale examples in Europe; queen breeding; swarming and colony splitting, the respective roles of male drones and female workers; modern scientific studies on the brain and mind of a bee, as well as the intelligence of an individual bee vs. that of the collective hive; bee communication; bee diseases, including Colony Collapse Disorder; the role of bees (and humans in China) in pollination; and a lot more.
But as much as the film is a veritable fount of entomological information, what I found most astonishing about the movie was the cinematography, especially when paired with its soundtrack, the combination of which is simply jaw-dropping. Modern day film cameras capture bees, magnified hundreds of times so that they appear birdlike in size. The cameras get inside the inner recesses of a bee’s secret lair, showing her feeding a queen, molding a queen cell, emerging from one, or performing a waggle dance to convey the direction and distance of pollinating plants. Similarly, cameras capture a drone and queen in flight, mating in mid-air, the drone dropping to the ground dead from his sacrificial (and one would hope satisfying) act of procreation. Bees fly in was motion, and the world is seen from the bee’s point of view, as if a mini camera were mounted on her back. In one particularly sad closeup you see a bee, perched on an almond flower, being sprayed with fungicide. She clings to her branch withstanding this chemical shower, but eventually succumbs and falls to the ground.
Apart from this technical virtuosity, cinematographer Jörg Jeshel captures all the natural beauty of the Swiss Alps and Austria. Traditional beekeeper, Fred Jaggi, looks like he could be a character right out of The Sound of Music. A genial beekeeper, Fred did not want to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps because he did not wish to get stung, but decided, “I’m no sissy” only when his father told him he would sell the hives if there was no one to take over the family business. In an extremely sad and moving scene we watch Fred, who has just been told that his colony was infected with foul brood, set about gassing his bees, then sweeping their carcasses into a pit along with frames and other equipment and setting it all on fire, a devastating emotional and economic loss.
Fred’s counterpart is John Miller, owner of Miller Honey Farms in Newcastle, California. He too comes from a long line of beekeepers but while Fred has kept things more or less small-scale, John has followed the capitalist imperative to grow the family business so that everything is ten-fold the scale it was in prior generations: the costs, the power used, the inventory, the number of hives, trucks, distances travelled, output, etc. John still cares about the bees but admits that he probably does not have the same emotional connection to them that he once did or that earlier generations of Millers did. They are more of a commodity to him. And given the devastation wrought to his bees by Colony Collapse Disorder, it would be too painful to take their deaths too much to heart. For him, when listening to the buzzing of bees, he hears “the sound of money.”
Towards the end of the film, we are introduced to a third beekeeper, another American, Fred Terry. Unlike John Miller who is a stand-in for the straightlaced commercial bee-keeper businessman, Terry seems like more of a laidback Arizonan ex-hippy. He talks about getting to know and gain respect for the Africanized (killer) bees who escaped from a breeding experiment in Brazil many years ago eventually arriving at our borders. He likens the fear of these bees to Americans’ distrust and suspicion of “the other,” namely illegal aliens. He admires the ability of killer bees to survive and thrive under conditions that thwart the more mellow European bees he had been accustomed to working with and surmises that long after human beings are gone from this planet, “there will be bees.”