Focus on bees: More than Honey & a call to sign a petition

“More than Honey” is more than a film about bee deaths.

The film is a multi-award-winning documentary by the renowned feature film director Markus Imhoof (“Das Boot ist voll”, “Let’s Make Money”, “Am Anfang war das Licht”, “We Feed The World”).

In spectacular images, it offers insights into the life of these busy creatures beyond flowers and honey. And into the role of humans.

More than a third of human food depends on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein is said to have said: “If the bees die out, humans will die out four years later.” For a few years now, whole bee colonies have been dying en masse.

The film begins with a beekeeper in the Swiss mountains. From there the film crew travelled around the world: first to the USA, where bees are transported on an industrial scale from monoculture to monoculture, then to China, where in some regions flowers already have to be pollinated by hand because there are no bees left.

In Austria, a family breeds queen bees and ships them all over the world. For anyone who wants to get bees to do what humans want – namely, produce higher yields – has to control the queens. Is this manipulation the key to explaining the mysterious mass deaths?

So far, only the so-called killer bees have been spared – they owe their name to their high resilience and aggressiveness. A beekeeper in the US state of Arizona who specialises in honey from these bees says: “The killer bees will outlive us all.”

Radar images, thermal cameras, infrared and UV images, magnetic resonance, time-lapse, macro and satellite footage are used. With this overwhelming material, Imhoof tells of the phenomenal intelligence of bees and their social life together – whether inside a beehive or during the mating of a queen in flight.

He interviews scientists, including his daughter and son-in-law, who run a research project on bees in Australia, where the great dying has not yet arrived. Will an isolated island in the Pacific become Noah’s ark for the bees?

Film trailer

Click to load — connects to YouTube

The bees need your voice

Almost 800,000 people have already signed the petition. If more than one million signatures are collected by 30 September 2021, the EU Commission must address the demands.

Bees, butterflies and all other pollinating insects are vital for our survival – as they are for the diversity of nature. Nevertheless, numerous insect species are threatened with extinction today.

To protect them, many committed people all over Europe are collecting signatures for the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) “Save bees and farmers”.

They are calling on the EU to support ecological agriculture without synthetic pesticides. Farmers should be supported in the agricultural transition, and species-rich habitats should be restored.

To the petition