Honeybee colony collapse disorder can seem like one more droplet in a deluge of bad environmental news. But a compelling new film that opens at the Museum of Fine Arts today suggests that losing the bees could bring global disaster a lot sooner than climate change, and that how we respond to its threat will be a measure of our future.
"Queen of the Sun: What are the Bees Telling Us?" from director Taggart Siegel is not the kind of documentary where both sides of an issue are considered with earnest even-handedness. There are no blustering Republican senators or industry-funded scientists here to denounce the film's assertions: that bee colonies are in trouble world-wide, that it's mostly man's fault, and that if we don't change soon, very bad things will happen. Instead a variety of often idiosyncratic beekeepers and other experts lament the industrial agriculture and chemical pesticides they blame for the loss of millions of hives in the U.S. and Europe.
"Colony collapse disorder is the bill we are getting for all we have done to the bees," one says. We have factory-farmed them just like pork and chicken, trucking them around the country to fertilize vast monocultures of agricultural products, subjected them to pesticides and genetically modified plants, and now ... the bees have had enough. And since they fertilize 40 percent of the world's food supply, according to the film, we had better begin reversing the damage.
The film is full of fascinating bee facts, some frightening - three-quarters of America's commercial bees spend Valentine's Day in California, fertilizing almonds - and some subtly beautiful. Bees like the same smells we do, for instance.
Some of the bee lovers are a bit out there - they seem to spend more time in the hives shirtless than wearing any kind of beekeeping gear - but their reverence for these insects and their role in what used to be our natural environment is inspiring.
If you're anything like me, most of your thinking about the environment these days is dominated by gloom about global warming, rising sea levels, increasing extreme weather, tornados and Japanese radiation leaks. "We're all gonna die" seems a reasonable conclusion, especially given the vast reservoirs of denial and inaction in the chambers of power.
"Queen of the Sun" will give you something new to worry about. But in the eyes of those beekeepers there is also hope.
The Globe's Mark Feeney reaches a slightly different conclusion about the film here. Information on movie tickets and showtimes at the MFA is here.
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