What Are the Bees Telling Us?
Produced by Jon Betz, directed by Taggart Siegel
Review by Abigail Lewis
If you’ve been thinking our biggest environmental problem is global warming, this provocative film directed by Taggart Siegel (The Real Dirt on Farmer John) will set your brain buzzing. While we’ve all being hearing about “colony collapse” among the bees, and we know it’s some kind of problem, it’s not that easy to connect the dots.
Queen of the Sun opens with lovely images of a gracefully dancing woman, but we quickly realize she’s literally covered with bees. Perhaps that should be rephrased. A multitude of bees perched on her lithe body sway in her rhythm, and all that buzzing must be some profound interspecies communication because she doesn’t seem to get stung.
Bees and humans, as it turns out, are interdependent. We share a community—as we do with all of nature, of course—but without the bees, no plants get pollinated and humans have no food. Bees function as the legs of plants.
Poor bees, they suffer from the same ills that ail us: illness, toxic air and junk food. They are actually fed corn syrup mixtures and antibiotics, and oh yes, bees who travel constantly to do our pollination “bidness” get travel weary much as we do—and that pure nectar you thought you were eating is very likely as contaminated as anything else we put in our mouths. We don’t even allow queen bees to mate normally and have their “marriage flight,” during which these sassy creatures usually hook up with up to a dozen drones. Instead, we artificially inseminate them and turn them into a monoculture.
Another reviewer called this film a “feel good advocacy film,” and despite the inclusion of such luminaries as Michael Pollan and Jeffrey Smith and a host of passionate beekeepers, it had a different effect on this writer. Rather it was a painful reminder that nothing we eat is immune from corporate farming and detrimental practices. Life can be sweet, but the more we poison our food, the more bitter our world.
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