More Than Honey

Today I saw the documentary More Than Honey, about the rapid decline of the world's bee population.

A frightening statistic—that 1.5 million bees have disappeared in 27 U.S. states in the past 15 years—serves as a catalyst for the extensive research that makes up this film.

Director Marcus Imhoof journeys to several faraway places to try and solve the mystery of why this species is dying out so quickly. He follows expert beekeepers John Miller and Fred Jaggi as they investigate their own work and try to make sense of the unknown, but their guesses are as good as ours.

Really, it could be anything (or a number of things), which may or may not include pesticides, global warming, invasive mites or even stress. Yes, there is such a thing as "bee stress."

Whatever is causing it needs to be figured out as soon as possible, though, because without bees to pollinate everything under the sun, we as humans will be without a food supply.

Scary, eh?

Though the film does a good job of showing us how it all works (from the mid-air mating of the bees to the glorious pollination of the flowers to the beekeepers transporting the bees to their locations for "work" and ultimately draining their honey), there really is no concrete theory put upon the viewer as to why the bees are disappearing, or how we could work together to stop it.

Not a lot of buzz for a message that really stings.

~~~