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New Bee Film at the TIFF - More Than Honey

2K views 2 replies 2 participants last post by  WesternWilson 
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I saw the film at TIFF and it was interesting, Einstein misquote notwithstanding! It left one more depressed/horrified than Queen of the Sun (which is lyrical and uplifting in spite of depicting the plight of the bees), but showcased how two men, both who had beekeeping dads and grand-dads, have gone in different directions. And in between, a little glimpse of a beekeeping business (Austria, Germany??) run by two ladies who were packaging and shipping queens. The beekeepers there do not carry smokers, but they keep a lit cigar clamped between their teeth. It must smell lovely, but I will keep my smoker!

The hardest part of the movie, which by the way is filmed absolutely beautifully, for me to watch was the segment where after pollination season, the hives trucked all over America are taken back to the winter yards and dissassembled....all the frames with brood go in one rack, all the honey frames in another, and then hives are re-assembled in the most appalling fashion, just any old brood frames thrown in each hive, empty frames on the outside, and the hives are all requeened. Then they are medicated to the gills and sorted for overwintering (which did not seem to be a screaming success) before the next season. It was hard as a beekeeper to watch the colonies ripped apart in this way.

The commmercial beekeeper/pollinator was obviously not happy that he has to do business this way, and remarked that his grandfather would walk off the property and say he'd sold his soul. Not, I would bet, before turning his grown grandson over his knee!

As the credits rolled, I decided my bees are probably the luckiest bees in the world. Doting mamma, only children (till next year!), plonked in the middle of a paradise of enthusiastic urban gardeners, with a lovely swathe of maples and red alders at their backs. They are feasted, dusted, oiled and coddled. I patted their hive today (it is a sunny, warm late fall day and they are madly gathering pollen) and said "bee happy, girls".
 
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