As one documentary on bees, Queen of the Sun, continues along the art house circuit, another, Colony, has just been released on DVD. The reason for the flurry of filmmaking is the "disappearance" of bees. According to news reports cited in Colony, 27 billion of the industrious creatures vanished in the U.S. during one recent year. Many hives are empty. It's a pressing concern because those helpful insects aren't obscure creatures confined to a few remote areas but essential to the world ecosystem and crucial to the maintenance of agriculture. What's good for the bees is good for us.
Colony hears out the claims and counterclaims on the cause for the disappearance of bees. Naturally, the chemical companies dispute the idea that newer forms of pesticides are causing bees to lose memory and immunity through the generations. Some biologists say that new parasites are taking their toll because queen bees in the U.S. are drawn from a shallow gene pool, leaving them vulnerable to disease. The beekeepers only know that their always-precarious business is collapsing under a poor economy and a paucity of full hives.
Directors Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell bring a sly sense of irony to the proceedings. One of the beekeeping families they observe behave at times like a hive, with each member carrying out defined tasks in the interest of the whole. And those pesticide-spraying helicopters hovering over the landscape resemble the bees they may be killing.
