Movie Buzz About Bees

Remember the post a while back on The Buzz About Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder? Yeah, that one. Well there’s a new short film out about the threat that this problem with bees poses to our food system, Every Third Bite. Eating Liberally says it is an “uplifting short about a downbeat subject” and sums it up like this…

Every Third Bite delivers a stinging truth: at the end of the day, our hyper-industrialized system of agriculture can’t wing it without these fuzzy little farm workers, who get schlepped from state to state like mini migrants to pollinate about $15 billion dollars worth of fruit, nut and vegetable crops each season.

Some other interesting tidbits from the post…

commercial beekeepers, in order to survive, have to harvest all the honey from their hives, leaving none for the bees, who are fed high fructose corn syrup instead.

(…)

industrial beekeeping not only deprives bees of their natural diet, it puts them on a grueling work schedule, shuttling them from one farm to the next all season long… As David Graves, a New Yorker who tends a dozen hives on the rooftops of New York City, tells the filmmakers: “People say, well, you keep your hives in New York City, poor bees! But they don’t realize that there’s such a variety of plants down here, and I don’t move the hives, so there is a period of time during the summer and in the fall when they rest. Bees need to rest just as us humans do.”

You can watch the entire 9-minute movie on the Media That Matters website. What does this add to our previous conversation about the way bees are used contrasted with the way the ecosystem naturally functions? Is it man manipulating nature or am I melodramatic?