Queen of the Sun
In the opening scene of Queen of the Sun, a new documentary by Taggart Siegel, a young woman dances slow and calm, while a swarm of honeybees covers her naked torso and drips from her chin. Another sequence features beekeeper Yvon Achard, who stands bare-chested above a thrumming hive in Grenoble, France. As he lifts a frame of honeycomb, thronged with crawling worker bees, he says in a lilting voice, "Beekeepers are chosen by bees." Then he holds the honeycomb up to his face, stroking the worker bees with the long, stiff bristles of his impressive mustache. Both man and bees appear perfectly content.
But as Siegel’s film makes clear, all is not well in the world of the domesticated honeybee. In the spring of 2006, I visited with migrant beekeepers in California’s Central Valley, to research an OnEarth story about honeybees (see "The Vanishing,") which had begun to die off in alarming numbers. My time among the keepers turned me into an enthusiastic watcher of both native bees and honeybees (the latter were brought to America by European colonists in 1622), so I was keen to see this new film from Siegel, the director behind the award-winning Real Dirt on Farmer John.
Every year since 2006, at least one third -- and sometimes many more -- of commercial U.S. hives have been dying out, abandoned by worker bees that leave behind combs full of honey and infant insects. The syndrome, known as "colony collapse disorder," afflicts bees in Europe as well, and though the problem has been studied intensively, no single cause has been identified. The likely culprits, Siegel suggests, are the multiple insults of modern society.
Among those are the array of chemicals that today’s bees encounter in agricultural fields. The insects often collect pollen from blooms sprayed with highly toxic pesticides, some of which might compromise their ability to fight off infections. One popular class of insecticides affects the bees’ nervous systems, so that they have trouble finding their way back to their hives. The bees are also afflicted with parasitic mites, which spread quickly from hive to hive when worker bees mix in orchards or fields. While commercial beekeepers routinely treat their hives with a chemical designed to kill the mites, the strategy seems to have succeeded only in breeding more resilient parasites.
The connection between humans and honeybees stretches back ten thousand years. When the first hunter-gatherers began to farm plants and livestock, we learn from the film, they shifted from simply robbing wild beehives of their honey to nurturing domesticated colonies: The bees pollinated crops and wild plants, transforming pollen into honey and wax, while the humans harvested honey from their colonies, leaving enough behind to nourish the insects through winter. For centuries, people carried bees with them everywhere they roamed, but the mechanization of agriculture has gradually warped or broken the ties that link bees to flowering plants, and people to honeybees.
Because we’ve found it profitable and convenient to grow crops in monoculture, for example, beekeepers now must take the bizarre step of carrying their bees to the blossoms. Queen of the Sun tracks migrant keepers as they make the cross-country trek every February to bring their hives to the Central Valley’s almond crop, where they rent their pollination services at ever-increasing prices. (Monoculture, says author Michael Pollan in the film, is agriculture’s "original sin," and gazing at the striking aerial shots of the vast orchards, wiped clean of wildflowers or weeds, you’re inclined to agree.) To get to California, the keepers drive thousands of miles in semis loaded with plastic-wrapped beehives, past other monocultures of corn, soybeans, and alfalfa. In 2007, a honeybee shortage meant that hives had to be imported all the way from Australia, bringing with them a virus against which American bees had no immunity.
Siegel’s film interweaves scenes of beekeepers around the world with brief animated sequences and inventive shots (close-ups from a bee’s a perspective, for instance) to illustrate the critical role the honeybee plays in sustaining the world’s food supply. He makes a compelling case that we need to radically change the way we grow food -- moving away from monocultures, surrounding crops with hedgerows of plants that bloom at different times, restricting the use of pesticides -- and though that’s a pretty tall order, he shows us some cause for hope. Gunther Hauk, for example, Virginia-based beekeeper, farmer, and activist who is one of the film’s central figures, is at the forefront of a movement to create bee sanctuaries where a variety of pesticide-free blooming plants nourish colonies through the seasons.
In bringing the audience up close with passionate beekeepers like Hauk, and in taking us inside the magical world of the honeybee -- this is a creature that directs its sisters to food sources via a syncopated dance entailing a violent rear-end waggle, after all -- Siegel manages to teaches us about something vital while entertaining us, as well.
