In Queen of the Sun, Bees are the Teachers

Remember the bee crisis? I still remember the peculiar mixture of disbelief and shock that arrived with the news. Bees, such indomitable, energetic creatures, were mysteriously dying off. And you know what? The epidemic is still in full swing: The U.S. honeybee population may be in terminal decline.

At the final screening of Queen of the Sun at SIFF, I spoke with Portland filmmakers Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz about their wild, entertaining, and thoughtful documentary on global bee health and welfare. Local note: cellist Jami Sieber did the score. (They're working on a theatrical release, so stay tuned. I vote for "Mead Night" at Central Cinema.) 

Siegel mentioned he remembers the shock to his system when he first saw an article on colony collapse disorder, years ago. At the time, his daughter was three years old, and he had visions of the fruitless, un-pollinated world that might await her.

Bee fact! "The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that about one-third of the human diet is derived from insect-pollinated plants and that the honey bee is responsible for 80 percent of this pollination." No bees, no almonds, apples, avocados, blueberries, cantaloupes, cherries, cranberries, cucumbers, sunflowers, watermelon....

I know, if you survey a shelf of recent documentaries, you might be tempted to conclude that the jig is up, and we might as well all look into assisted suicide. We plunge from crisis to crisis, from peak oil, global warming, and global economic meltdowns, to food that's killing us, superbugs, and the autism epidemic. 

But while Queen of the Sun opens with colony collapse, and spends time rounding up the likely suspects (varroa mites, the acute paralysis virus), Siegel and Betz have really made a poignant film about relationships. Siegel said that while he started making the film as a response to the crisis, he soon realized that human-bee relations (out of balance as they are currently) was his real, more instructive subject, not a parade of people saying, "There's a real problem here! And here's how we solve it." He and Betz decided that there was an untold love story that needed telling, instead.

And they would add one more twist.

"The bee is the point-of-view character," explained Siegel. And he has followed through on that--the camera often zooms through fields at bee-height, your eye attracted by vibrant colors. And bees in close-up or en masse appear in scene after scene with the human "supporting characters," as Siegel calls them. They are beekeepers (commercial, backyard, and rooftop), farmers, philosophers, scientists, celebrities (Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva), artists, and educators.

Some of the most memorable moments in the film are between bees (watching the waggle dance, or a swarm), bees and people (a 70-year-old German yogi-professor-beekeeper uses his enormous yogic mustache to tickle his bees, another refers proudly to his "good girls") and people (the New Zealand bee-keeping family, the autistic gardeners). Gradually, you are engulfed by wonder, what Betz sums up as: "Bees are just amazing!"

This is counterposed to our kneejerk, masters-of-the-universe reaction to diagnose CCD and move on. Queen of the Sun offers a counter narrative--if anything, the bees diagnose us. Betz said they made a decision to avoid a more politically activist stance because they are in essence promoting more of a philosophic shift, something they hope has a longer shelf-life than crisis-of-the-week.

In 1923, Rudolf Steiner gave a serious of lectures on bees, the film notes, in which he predicted our imposing an ill-fitting industrial culture on bee cultivation would end up destroying the bees' own successful, adaptive culture. (Steiner said a lot of things, but there's a deeply, embarrassingly human truth to his criticism of our attempt to modernize bees for productivity, when they are still our leading models for density, sustainability, and allocation of resources.)

The film is sympathetic to this insight, and contrasts biodynamic bee-raising approaches that ask first, "What would a bee like?" with the commercial system which ships bees around like migratory workers. The critique is explicit: Siegel and Betz are not equating the treatment of bees and migrant workers, they're inspecting a process in which everything from bees to people is treated like a just-in-time widget.

But Siegel's approach (as in his previous film, The Real Dirt on Farmer John) is not to let outrage about bees subsisting on high fructose corn syrup and antibiotics, exposed to pesticides and viruses, and worked to death (draw parallels if you want) steal focus and paralyze. Siegel doesn't expect our industrial agriculture machine to change overnight, but he does present an alternative. Why, he asks, couldn't four mega-farms, even if they are devoted to monoculture, create at their intersection a bee sanctuary where bees could live all year round?

The quirkiness, too, of Siegel's beekeeping interviewees becomes a statement. It's heart-warming, absolutely, to see how genuinely his people talk about their life with bees, but it's also a response to corporatized ideology.

They're more stewards than owners, for one, and for another, in dedicating themselves to this form of service, they've been freed to be whoever they want to be (bees have a very tolerant dress code). It's the opposite of what you might expect--we talk about bee "drones" after all--but that just underscores what Siegel said he learned taking his camera to the field to follow bees around: "There's a lot going on there."