Bees on film

Home from San Francisco there was barely time to unpack the suitcase before heading off to the 57th Sydney Film Festival. I always scan the programme for anything to do with food and of the few films I managed to see this year only two had prominent food content.
Food was unexpectedly significant in I am Love, a lavish Italian film which has Tilda Swinton falling for her son's friend who happens to be a chef. She is seduced in part by a dish of prawns which said chef prepares for her which looked none too appetising on the screen, certainly not the sort of thing you would be prepared to leave home for. The dramatic ending hinges on sharing the recipe for a favourite Russian soup which also seemed to have lost something in translation and didn't look as though it deserved all the emotional turmoil it unleashed. Obviously it is not so easy to make food look as glamorous as Tilda Swinton in a simple, beautifully cut dress or to use a plate of prawns to convey messages in the same way as scenes of Milan wrapped in snow. There is a lot more going on here of course than just cooking and eating although the scenes which showed food being prepared and served were used to good effect to demonstrate a range of important elements in the story such as power, class, sensual pleasure, desire, satisfaction, love, reciprocity, nurturing and belonging.
The one film which was specifically food related was Colony  a documentary about bees and bee keepers in America and the threat of Colony Collapse Disorder to their livelihoods, focusing on David Mendes (Vice President of the American Bee-Keeping Federation) and Lance and Victor Seppi, novice bee keepers of Pixley, California.
The Seppi family are worthy of a documentary in their own right. Fundamentalist Christians they struggle with the conflict between their religious beliefs and the need to be business men and to do business in difficult times and with the tensions doing business creates within the family. The parallels between the workings of the bee hive and the family are obvious, especially the role of the Seppi matriarch and that of the Queen bee. More subtle is the mirroring of the collapse of the hives in the collapse of the life of the bee keepers and the suggestion that whilst bees normally know their role and work in harmony for the common good the same cannot always be said for humans. The Seppi's struggle to keep their fledgling business alive, meanwhile David Mendes tries to find a cause for Colony Collapse Disorder and to keep the members of his association informed.

I was especially interested in this story because I had just returned from seeing acres and acres of almond trees in California. What I didn't know then was that the pollination of these trees is the biggest managed pollination event in the world. American bee keepers make their money out of shipping their bees around the country from Florida to Maine and over to Washington and California to pollinate various crops like apples and blueberries as well as almonds. Thousands of hives are packed onto semi-trailers and moved from one pollination event to the next. In California the pollination of the almond trees takes place in February and requires more than 1.3 million hives! A grower usually needs 2.5, 6 frame hives per acre and negotiates a contract with bee keepers to supply the number of hives he needs. Growers pay somewhere between $US 120 -150 per hive which means that the cost of pollination accounts for around 20% of their overall costs.

Bee hives suffer attacks from fungi, viruses, bacteria, parasites and other insects most of which are understood and manageable. Numbers of bees also decrease in winter because of the colder weather. Colony Collapse Disorder is a newly defined phenomenon, first properly identified in 2006, without, it would seem, any one particular cause. Just how significant loses from CCD are seems difficult to determine. Figures suggest that US bee keepers typically lose around 30% or more of their bees over winter but keepers who suffer CCD can lose 45% of their bees hence their concern to know what to do to either combat the problem or prevent it. David Mendes is shown as prosecuting the case with pesticide manufacturers who appear to be typically uncaring, convinced they are in no way responsible and uninterested in finding a solution. There seemed to be no move on the part of the growers themselves to help the bee keepers either financially or politically.

The film covered the tense and mutually dependent relationship of the growers and the bee keepers. The bee keepers have to contend with growers who renege on contracts and source cheaper bees elsewhere or drive hard bargains, arguing that $120US per hive favoured by growers is not economical. The growers on the other hand do not trust the bee keepers to supply healthy bees or to be able to honour their contract based on the number of frames/hive/acre. In the case of the almond crop the situation gets even more complicated when you add in problems for the growers such as decreasing prices for almonds and decreasing yields and acreages because of issues with water allocation in California, and increasing cost for the bee keepers.

No bees does in truth mean no honey, no work and no money on a vast scale. This was a very interesting and thought provoking insight into just one corner of our food supply and the complicated, fragile web of interdependence so vulnerable to influences that we cannot control.

Colony Collapse Disorder gets a mention in the press from time to time – the latest suggestion is that it might be caused by radiation from mobile phones.