More Than Honey

Worldwide, millions of honeybee colonies are dying each year. Is this just a momentary fluke? in the unwritten contract between human and bee or are we facing the early stages of a total collapse of the system? Is it caused by bees or us? Far from being a casual curiosity, the death of honeybees gains frightening importance when we consider that they pollinate a third of all the food we eat! A complete understanding about the causes of death are yet to be determined, but one thing is certain: We are not just dealing with a few dead insects, and there's more at stake than just a bit of honey. "If the bee goes extinct, man will surely follow within four years" is how Albert Einstein might have worded the problem. Searching for answers, More Than Honey takes us around the world to meet people living with and off honeybees. On our trip we meet almond growers in California, a Swiss mountain beekeeper, a neuroscientist investigating bee brains in Berlin, a pollen dealer in China, and a bee researcher in Australia. We even get to see "killer bees" invading the New World. We gain spectacular visual insights into the beehive – a fascinating world of fighting queens and dancing workers, of highly sophisticated swarm intelligence, where the individual constantly serves the requirements of the community. The relationship between humans and honeybees tells us a lot about ourselves, about nature and about our future. We understand that stability is just as unhealthy as unlimited growth and that it is crisis and catastrophe that fuels evolutionary developments. And we learn that a remedy might sometimes arise in the camouflage of a catastrophe and from a totally unexpected source. Everybody talks about the death of the honeybee. More Than Honey shows us more about it's life. (Antidote Films)