Queen of the Sun

I recently stumbled across a documentary film about bees. Queen of the Sun is a 2010 documentary film distributed by Collective Eye -an interesting non profit company that specialising in documentaries on a number of subjects. Queen of the Sun seems to have garnered some recognition, it's Wikipedia entry mentions a few awards it's received and shortlists it made.

You can buy it from Amazon, of course, or the direct from from the film's dedicated website. The more naughty people out there can probably find a Torrent file to download it illegally with bitTorrent -but of course the downside is you'll burn in hell for undermining the entertainment industry. I think there's about 22 seeds at the time of writing, not that I'd do that of course.. It doesn't seem to be on Usenet at the moment.

The film opens with well let's call her an eccentric lady, a less charitable person might call her a whackjob but we'll go with eccentric. She's dancing apparently topless but for a load of bees on her upper body and lower face. I don't have boobs but if I did I don't think I'd want to be stung in them. Truth is that when bees swarm they're fairly placid and when people do those bee beards or in this case bee beard and bee bodice they attach a caged queen bee to themselves and the bees swarm to them. Still don't think I'd fancy it. I'm also inclined to think it's buggering your bees about unnecessarily. There's a shot of her at the end of the credits too, just in case you missed it at the start.

The first speaker is a Biodynamic Beekeeper called Gunther Hawk, some of the footage of him was also used in the 2009 documentary film The Vanishing of The Bees. Gunther co-wrote Bees in 1998 and in 2002 wrote Toward Saving the Honeybee so evidently he's been around bees for a long time. He also created a honey bee sanctuary, Spikenard Farm, which is shown in the film and appears to be still functioning today. He was trying to frame the honey bee crisis as a learning opportunity. He was shown pulling a huge frame of bees from a very large hive armed with a smoker and hive tool but no protective gear on -this seemed to be a common thing amongst the beekeepers shown through the film.

Next up was an organic queen and bee breeder by the name of Kirk Webster. His contribution to setting the scene was pointing out that without bees we'd be living on bread, oatmeal and a couple of nuts. Then we had Carlo Petreni, an Italian chap and founder of the Slow Food, the Slow Food UK website is worth a look. He tells us there'll be no agriculture without bee. Michael Pollan, author of a number of books I've not read including The Omnivore's Dilemma. He tells us bees pollinate about 40% of our food. By now the watcher is possibly a little confused about how much of our food is actually pollinated by bees but probably pretty sue that losing them wouldn't be a great thing for us.

Next up as another eccentric chap in France who's shown working his hives clad in only loose white trousers, some beads and a pair of sandals. Yep he's beekeeping topless, and  very nearly trouserless too going by how thin his kegs seem to be. He talks about the love he feels for his queen bees and goes on to stroke the bees with his moustache telling the camera they enjoy this. I'm not entirely sure how he knows this but they don't sting him in the face to prove otherwise.

There's some information about the history of bees and honey in relation to human spirituality and nutrition. There's a stop start animated sequence representing an archaeologist finding honey buried with Tutankhamen. The the chap tells us that honey contains a lot of silica, which is in all things then it gets a little hippie with the silica content linking man to everything else or something. I think my hippy filter kicked in at this point and I zoned out for a few moments. Coming back into reality with a bump we're told how a chap called Rudolf Steiner, father of biodynamic agriculture, had foretold industrialisation would damage bees. Whilst he appears to have been right the food industry marched on with industrialisation anyway. He was also right in 1923 when he suggested it'd be a bad thing for central Europe if the National Socialists came to power in Germany, which goes to show just because you're right doesn't mean people are going to listen.

Various practices are offered as causes of Colony collapse Disorder with Bayer being named as one of the pesticide manufacturers responsible for the current mess. In a literary nod to Cervantes an Italian chap compares beekeepers fighting pesticide companies to trying to fight windmills. The film goes on to discuss negative aspects of monoculture using the California almond harvest as an example. Apparently it takes three quarters of the USA's honeybees to pollinate the almond trees which are grown in a massive monoculture which nature itself would be unable to sustain. Gathering so many bee colonies together allows diseases to spread rapidly between them and when they leave the almond harvest they take any diseases they've acquired home with them. How antibiotics used on bees find their way to people -although in the UK we're not allowed to use them ourselves anymore. Artificial insemination of bees and genetic considerations are also touched upon. The various theories on Colony Collapse Disorder aren't yet proven, and certainly weren't when the film was made, but they're presented as if they are known facts -although I personally suspect monoculture and pesticides are the biggies.

The film has previously been criticised for it's lack of balance and presenting theories as facts but something I'd draw issue with is some of the speakers. There's a variety of them ranging from biodynamic beekeepers to physicists and biologists with a range of credibility for example I'm not certain what qualifies a physicist to talk about beekeeping over any other beekeeper for example, and a guy who brushes his bees with a his moustache strikes me as a little unwise. Some of the speakers make claims that are simply wrong, for example an Australian chap states bee venom and rattlesnake venom are the same the only difference in quantity. A little googling shows me they're actually chemically very different substances. And of course there's the various beekeepers dislike of protective equipment. Away from the various speakers there's footage of a few unusual hives including a large egg shaped one, and some other large hives I wasn't familiar with. There's also some someone using  lift to nadir a Warré hive and some great video of young varroa mites. Unfortunately the whole thing has an air of new ageism which may well appeal to die hard hippies and crusties out there but it really made me cringe in places and may serve to undermine it's message.

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.