More Than Honey

Director Marcus Imhoof comes from a long line of beekeepers. As a child, he loved the sound of buzzing bees. His grandfather explained to him that the flowers had sex through the bees and were able to reproduce thanks to them. These days, though, things aren't going well for bees, and Imhoof wants to find out why. He starts in the Swiss Alps, where an old-school beekeeper is trying to prevent different species of bees from interbreeding - to no avail. It's unclear whether this interbreeding is causing the decline, or even complete extinction, of some species. There's no getting away from the facts, though - not even for the beekeeper in this seemingly untouched place. We travel to four continents to look at how bees are kept nowadays, what the cause of the problems could be, and how they might be solved. We learn, for example, that beekeepers are forever interfering with the natural course of events in order to breed more queens - even Imhoof's grandfather used to do it. New film techniques make it possible to capture bee behavior from up close, even getting inside the beehive, which makes for some fascinating cinematography. We see close-up shots of a queen bee being fertilized in mid-air, and another bee nearly dying when the flower it's in is sprayed with pesticides.