Bees on the box

Been watching some honey bee related programs.

Recently the BBC Two's Natural World series showed an episode called Queen of the Savannah which followed the fortunes of a colony of African honey bees and a herd of elephants. Not having a TV I watched it on the internet, by the time of writing it's probably no longer on BBC iPlayer unfortunately but it's probably still up on youtube -or for those naughty people who aren't adverse to a illegally downloading copyrighted material it can be donwloaded as a torrent from Pirate Bay or for the more careful pirates who use newsgroups instead there's an NZB file for it -not that I'm advocating, endorsing or reccomending illegally downloading copyrighted content of course. Afterall according to the entertainment industry illegal downloading is killing the entertainment industry, some may say it's the mediocre dross being pumped out by the  industry that's doing the real damage ..but that's a whole nother arguement waaaaay outside the scope of this blog.

So back to the Queen of the Savannah. Unlike our bee colonies which will set up a colony at a site and remain there as long as the site remains african honey bees are migratory (which I didn't know) and move to keep up with changes in forage availability. It starts with a queenless colony living in an acacia tree and follows the bees raising a new queen, being harvested by a local honey hunter, swarming, a stint doing elephant guard duty in a bee fence, and eventually migrating to a forest area. It contains some amazing footage of inside the colony filming what goes on on the comb itself, a Queen hatching, the waggle dance (of course), the short battle between two queens and lots of bees going about their housekeeping. What is a little misleading is that the program omits to mention that all that activity takes place in near darkness and the bright light it's filmed in was added for the benefit of the camera. The programme then goes on to the situation of honey bees in Britain and their urban resurgence.

The BBC made another decent documentary about bees back in 2009 called Who Killed The Honey Bee? about the dissapearance of the bees. It follows some of americas large scale beekeepers trying to understand Colony Collapse Disorder and the mysterious dissappearances of millions of bees. It was repeated last year and you can probably find a torrent to download the program with or find it on YouTube. The programme is actually renarrated and re-edited footage from the full length american documentary film Vanishing of the Bees. An interesting film for anyone interested in bees but probably overly long for anyone who isn't, and the narrator sounds like some kind of wierd female robot which grates after about half a minute. Apart form a few beekeeping players and pundits edited out of the BBC documentary this film also mentions the import of cheap dodgy honey blended with various syrups exported from China and marketed as honey in the western world.

*Spoiler alert* in case you were wondering the biggest suspects for Colony Collapse Disorder seem to be pesticides and monoculture.