The Cameo Cinema in Edinburgh held a special screening of Vanishing of the Bees this week, a documentary about, er, bees that are leaving the hive, NEVER TO BE SEEN AGAIN.
The night started with a brief speech and Q&A with two members of the Edinburgh and Midlothian Beekeepers’ Association, who hadn’t seen the documentary either but said that Scottish beekeeping — along with sharing in the global issue of vanishing bees — had some local problems with disease.
Then they screened the documentary. Cinematically, it’s nothing groundbreaking or overly impressive (there were some good puns, however). It traces the global phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder, where entire hives become empty within a matter of hours with no single discernible 'smoking gun'. The conclusion seems to be that a number of factors combine in different ways to cause the mass disappearance of honeybees, while compelling circumstantially, offers insufficient scientific proof to the US (and many European) governments to take concrete action.
The Co-operative (who supported the film financially) got their marketing in there and it kind of messed up the flow, frankly. The message, however, is important: the fact that bees are vanishing in such numbers is a sure sign that nature is beginning to fight back for all the abuse we’ve put it through in our demand of ever cheaper food, in ever greater quantities. The fact that there is even an industry for pollination - where beekeepers truck their bees over thousands of miles to pollinate specialty farms - simply feels wrong; not to mention the practice of feeding bees sugar water instead of their own nutritious honey, artificially inseminating queen bees, and replacing the queen bee when the original is no longer deemed 'efficient'. Human beings truly know no bounds in exploitation, and yet we do not fully understand the ramifications of such exploitation.
I definitely learned some interesting facts and was made aware of how absolutely unsustainable industrial farming has become (it is now a fact, not a debate). As one of the academics in the documentary noted, the best thing we can do is ‘vote with our forks’. Assuming we can all afford farmers’ market prices. Our economies and industries are set up to ensure that most of the population can’t.
There will never be the political will to do what is necessary to bring the ecosystem back into (an approximation of) some sort of balance. Have you read The Road? That is our future if we don’t get ourselves sorted out very soon.
