Beekeepers With Bite
Highlights of Vanishing of the Bees mostly come from the extensive interviews and shadowing of commercial beekeepers David Hackenberg and Dave Mendes of Florida, who sell honey, but like most large beekeeping operations make the bulk of their income from trucking their hives around the country to pollinate bee-dependent crops like almonds and blueberries. Hackenberg was one of the first beekeepers to notice CCD in his hives as something fundamentally different from other bee losses he'd seen, and draw national attention to the problem.
Part of the mystery of CCD came not just from the fact that a specific virus or pathogen wasn't immediately obvious, but also in the fact that there simply weren't any bees – alive or dead – left in many of the colonies. Or, the only bees left were the queen and the babies, left all alone, something, as Hackenberg explains, "bees just don't do."
Vanishing of the Bees follows Hackenberg and Mendes as they work to find answers to solve CCD. By the time the camera trails them on a trip to France to meet with beekeepers there who faced similar problems in the early 1990s, the viewer is invested enough to share the excitement of the highly animated dual language conversation about their shared suspicions of the likely causes. We also come to care about the bees enough to find scenes of laboratory insemination of queen bees more than a tad disturbing.
The Bee's the Thing
While Hackenberg and Mendes provide the emotional core of Vanishing of the Bees, many sources, including the hilarious Dennis van Englesdorp, an entomologist with Penn State, add punch, information, and varying points of view. Critics of large-scale beekeeping, like that practiced by Hackenberg and Mendes, for example, have their say. For as much as the film relies on viewers connecting with the beekeepers, the main character is still the honeybee.
The importance of honeybees as both pollinators of our food and as bellwethers of environmental problems is well explained in Vanishing of the Bees; a bit more about healthy hives and how they should look and behave before the devastation of CCD hit would probably make some of the footage of dead hives more powerful early on in the film. That said, the level of explanation provided – about the importance of bees, about how the Environmental Protection Agency is run, about modern agricultural practices, about the history of synthetic pesticides — makes all the arguments and conclusions in the film easily comprehensible to even the least CCD informed.
