More Than Honey is a Swiss documentary about the relationship and emerging ecological crisis between men and bees, but it has a more impressionistic and poetic narrative than the Nova/PBS style type documentaries that the average viewer is used to. If More Than Honey can get me to gasp at the brutal execution of a queen bee by her human, then this film succeeded because I am not a fan of insects even if I objectively know that I need them to survive.
More Than Honey creates empathy by the camera frequently turning its focus to depict the life of a bee from their perspective. We see the birth of a queen bee, drones in flight and the invasion by bee vampire like ticks on a colony. The film explores the life of a traditional Swiss bee farmer, a California commercial farmer as he transports and merges colonies, the artificial production of queen bee and genetic manipulation of the colony, the existing crisis in China, the Australian bee sanctuary and the world’s only hope, killer bees.
I was confused by a couple of elements of the film. Specifically, I could not distinguish the narrator’s voice, the director of the film and a descendant of a former bee farmer, from John Hurt’s narration, who infrequently explained what we were seeing. Usually scenes unfolded without much explanation, but a less distracted viewer will probably be less confused.
While More Than Honey dispassionately depicts how human beings interact with bees and is more objectively valuable than a preach to the choir documentary, the films shows why it is obvious why there is a crisis. We can’t just force inhumane traveling conditions, expose them to toxins, make them incessantly dependent on antibiotics, casually destroy their community (there is a theory that the hive should be viewed as a single organism) and steal their work without any negative side effects. Of course they are going to die and so should we.
I highly recommend that you watch More Than Honey to learn more about bees and human beings, but be prepared for casual cruelty and to empathize with the bees over the human beings, even if you are instinctually disgusted by insects like me.