More Than Honey ~Analysis, Response and Critique~

When I watched the movie More Than Honey, I experienced quite a lot of emotions. One of them was concerning the state of the bees that had to suffer through this unfortunate treatment of their hive. What beekeepers have been doing to them threatens their status as a worker, their social behaviors, and their life in the colony. What might be seen as just another number to the farmers who do this for a living is really a living, breathing organism that has just as much right to be treated fairly as another farm animal such as a horse or a pig would be. 

The thought that what can truly be described as frightening to us is not what a swarm of angry bees can do to us, but what we have done to it. What's really crucial to understanding the bee crisis that has befallen our industry, known primarily as colony collapse disorder, is that we can't just blame it on other people who don't know any better. Since we have this movie to educate us about what is being done to the bees in our current generation, we have to take the responsibility into our own hands and realize that if this kind of abuse is allowed to continue, we will eventually not have many bees left, and then we will have ourselves a real crisis on our hands.

The film takes us through the journey of a man named Markus Imhoof and contrasts his family tradition of harvesting the honey of bees with more mainstream mass production techniques in which bee colonies are harvested, carried from place to place in trucks, and are exploited to populate enormous orchards that generate massive amounts of honey for profit. With visuals that compel us to feel something for these gentle, delicate creatures of flight, the movie directs us to pay close attention to what the modern beekeepers are doing to the bee society and the process by which they are systematically removing all traces of natural action from the bee lifestyle. It invites us to observe and casually wonder if any of this that we're seeing is necessarily wrong or not.



Bees are now suffering from a great threat, and who is to blame? The movie suggests that farmers and workers associated with the people who mistreat these animals don't really care about the development of the bee's natural patterns as much as the profit they are able to generate. It makes itself very clear by illustrating how the heads of the farms themselves speak of their goals as only being for the success of their business in the bee farming industry. What really sets me on edge is their indifferent attitude towards the millions of deaths of the bees. They seem that intent on forwarding their business by taking various colonies and genetically inserting a queen based on what they determine she should be like. This movie is not directly blaming anything on human beings, but by stating the facts and showing us often gruesome imagery of all the terrible things bees go through when being trucked, their queen separated, and often confusing social signals, it leads us to the conclusion that something we are doing definitely isn't right.

In short, I find this movie to be very informative and very stimulating, letting you use your own judgement to determine what the best course of action would be to choose to stop this from carrying on. The film helps to dispel the myth that "bees are dangerous and some will kill you if they are not contained, warning us of an undeserved bad reputation that humans created. Bees are not as dangerous as we think they are... but if modern beekeepers of mass production aren't careful, they might wipe out an entire species that nature depends on to spread pollen and help plants grow.