“MORE THAN HONEY” by Markus Imhoof
Bees are more than just honey producers: A documentary.
More than a third of our food is dependent on pollination by bees. The physicist Albert Einstein is said to have said: “If bees die out, humans will die out four years later.”
The renowned director Markus Imhoof(Das Boot ist voll) was familiar with the unique world of busy insects from an early age and still has a family connection with them today: “My grandfather’s apiary was a magical place for us children. Fascinating, but also scary when we ventured barefoot closer to the excited buzzing in the summer heat. And in the middle of it all was the old man in a straw hat, without any protection. The bees did nothing to him, as if they knew him.” Today, it is his daughter and son-in-law who are leading a research project with bees in Australia.
Starting with a beekeeper in the Swiss mountains, Markus Imhoof has traveled around the world. To the USA, where bees are transported from monoculture to monoculture on an industrial scale, or to China, where in certain regions the flowers already have to be pollinated by hand. In Arizona he meets Fred Terry, who specializes in killer bees, and in Austria he meets the Singer family, who breed queens and send them all over the world. He interviews scientists, talks about the phenomenal intelligence of bees and their social coexistence. Finally, we are in Australia, where bee mortality has not yet arrived and where the young Baer-Imhoof family is conducting its research.
Cinema release: 25.20.2012 at Riffraff, Neugasse 57-63, 8005 Zurich, box office 044 444 22 00