The Queen of the Sun: A Spiritual Plea for the Dismantling of the Industrial Bee Complex

The Queen of the Sun premiered Friday, September 19th at the normally quiet Hollywood Theatre in Portland to a line of people that stretched out the door and far down the sidewalk.  Directed by Taggart Siegel, The Queen of the Sun offers a rich look into the complex and, in some cases, interdependent relationship between humans and bees, told primarily through the people who interact with these fascinating creatures daily – beekeepers.  The documentary informs us of the benefits provided to humans by bees while raising a plea for a new concentrated effort for the global stewardship of these threatened insects.  In a nutshell, the director takes us across the earth, to places such as New Zealand, Italy, England, and the United States, to explore the various ways that honeybees enrich the lives of people and, conversely, the way that people disrupt the lives of bees.  At issue is the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of entire bee colonies across the United States and other countries, known as Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

The film is best described as science-lite with a heavy undercurrent of spirituality and an artistic cinematographic flare.  There are many beautiful shots of flower studded landscapes and verdant organic farms.  Many of the people and families that we meet are friendly and sincere, oftentimes involved in some type of environmental grassroots project or other healthy nature-based business venture.  Juxtaposed against these are shots of stagnant and decaying commercial corn fields, miles of uninviting monoculture soybean fields, and millions of caged bees as they are jostled, packaged, crushed, and shipped across country on large flatbed trucks in iron-gray industrial containers.  The message made by the documentary’s play between bands of industrial beekeepers, rigidly moving amongst a swarm of angry bees in their dirty body suits with meshed masks hiding their pale faces, and the tanned biodynamic beekeeper, wearing nothing more than a pair of clean white linen pants and maybe a shirt while connecting at a spiritual level with the individual bee, is clear – we got to get back down to our farming roots in order to save the bee.

However, it is unclear what is actually causing the colonies to collapse, as many scientists continue to point out to this day, though one wouldn’t know this just by watching the documentary.  Colony Collapse Disorder was identified only 4 years ago by beekeeper David Hackenback and wasn’t given an official title until 2007.  Even still, CCD has had devastating effects on bee communities, wiping out between 30% to 90% of some beekeepers’ stock.  This is a cause for concern, given the implications of what the continued trend in decreasing bees may mean to humanity.   Though some people in The Queen of the Sun may have you believe that a loss of bees would result in the entire annihilation of humanity, the result will most likely be less severe, though still very very bad.  Anywhere between 96 to 115, or about half, of the leading agricultural food commodities rely on the pollination by bees.  If the bees disappear we will have no other option than to manually pollinate our plants, a practice that is done today in China and which, it is estimated, would cost the U.K. $2,750 million a year to perform.  Statistically, the outlook is grim.  Crops requiring animal pollination have increased by 300% over the last 50 years while worldwide bee populations have increased by only 45%.  United States populations have actually been cut by two-thirds.

The result of such a disproportion of bees in relation to pollinated plants is an overworked and stressed out bee population that must be transported, sometimes across an entire country, in order to perform the level of pollination required by some of today’s giant commercial agricultural farmlands.  One such migration that occurs early each year in California for a large almond growing operation is covered in good detail by the film.  The forced migrations of bees is required not only due to the limited population of bees, but because bees simply cannot survive in the large monoculture tracts of land made popular by agricultural industrialization.  Except for several weeks a year when the plants are flowering, there just isn’t any food for the bees on these unnatural farms.  Even so, transported bees do not naturally get the nutrition that they need under these industrial migratory conditions.  Some die while in transport, while others must be fed a supplement of sugar water and protein or high fructose corn syrup.

The annual industrial migrations not only stress out the bees, making them more susceptible to diseases and mites, but they also help spread viruses from one bee population to another, leading to the propagation of viruses nationwide in the matter of months.  One such contagion, the fungal parasite Nosema ceranae, happened to navigate, potentially under such conditions, from Europe to the Americas and, as recently as June 2010, was identified by scientists as one of the leading culprits in CCD.  Despite this, N ceranae is not covered at all in The Queen of the Sun.

The absence of N ceranae within the documentary is not in itself a strike against the film.  There are, by some counts, over 60 potential causes of CCD.  In fact, there is no conclusive proof as to what has led to the sudden outbreak of CCD.  The documentary loses credibility due to the very fact that it does not explicitly state this, but instead presents a wide range of bee threats (GMOs, non-organic farming practices, mite poisons, the reduction of bee swarming, caging queens, etc) as if they are all proven CCD culprits.  Certain likely candidates are discussed, such as pesticides, which even the EPA has pointed to as having extremely detrimental effects over time on overexposed bee colonies.  But other less prevalent ideas, such as queen bee forced insemination practices, are given just as much weight by the film.  What it amounts to is a film that may catalyze the already converted environmentally sensitive population into building backyard bee hives in order to increase the overall bee population, but will leave the rest of the consumer driven population, who would rather scrape a bee off the grill of their pickup truck than leave their air conditioned homes in order to scrape honeycomb from a beehive, unconvinced that there really is a problem.

Such omissions are the downfall of an otherwise promising documentary and leave it with an unsettling edge of leftist propaganda mixed with occultism.  Where are the counterarguments?  Where are the credentials?  Information within the film is provided by a range of people, some of who appear to be qualified and credible, others less so, in some cases so questionable that it is enough to make me cringe.  A physicist is quoted on several occasions, in one scene discussing the negative impacts of genetically modified plants on bees.  A writer also chimes in on the subject of GMOs.  What, I ask, does a physicist and an author have to do with biology?  The film launches with a quote made by occultist and Anthroposophy founder Rudolf Steiner foretelling the destruction of honeybees by industrialization, and then tenuously ties the quote to the current phenomenon of Colony Collapse Disorder as if Steiner predicted it all along.  Biodynamic Agriculture has ties to Anthroposophy, and several biodynamic farmers feature prominently in this film, so the use of Steiner is not altogether foreign.  However, despite subject matter like this being like crack cocaine for the progressive population of Portland, it will most likely turn off people of a more pragmatic, scientific, or conservative viewpoint — that is, those of us who are not already riding the spiritual bee waves of Shangri-La.  In fact, the opening sequence of a strange woman performing some type of yoga with a torso covered in bees will most likely cause more chuckles in the crowd than gasps of astonishment.  The same is true for some of the animated sequences that occur in bursts throughout the movie.  This is a shame because overall the film has much to offer, were the message crafted more concretely.  Hell, I consider myself a liberal progressive – a vegan attuned to the organic food movement – but I like my facts based in science and not mixed with some spiritual flavoring consisting of energy waves and life forces.  Such material and factual omissions make me skeptical, as I would hope they would make any other person skeptical, and there, I fear, is what will ultimately prevent this film from building any sort of large movement that could dismantle or fundamentally change industrial food and bee farming practices.

One saving grace of the documentary is that, if skeptical people actually do consult the literature in order to learn more about Colony Collapse Disorder, they will find the concerns that are raised by the movie valid to a great extent, but they will encounter a reality much more complex and interesting.  That said, most people won’t take this extra step, and because many of these people will not see CCD mentioned in their bibles they will end up dismissing the bee crisis as some form of baseless leftist agenda against consumerism and our great nation, the US of A.  But if the documentary only results in a spike of backyard bee hives in Portland and crunchy meccas across America, without any further impact to current bee industrialization practices, that may not be a bad thing.  According to Almuhanad Melhim, a research associate at the University of Guelph who studies beekeeping economics, one of the leading causes in the decline of bees over the last 50 years in America is the reduction in beekeepers because the economics of raising bees are no longer favorable.  What could be more economical than the free farming of bees by volunteers?

Though the film includes several shots of cotton stuffed bees and flowers, I think overall the documentary would have benefited from a heavy dose of puppets in order to lighten up the spiritual insanity.

The Queen of the Sun

(2 puppets)

I would recommend that anybody interested in the subject of Colony Collapse Disorder perform additional research into the subject, preferably by reading articles in credible academic journals or established newspapers.  I have included several articles below that I referenced when writing this review in order to get one started.  Most libraries now provide access to databases that house millions of articles.  Talk with your librarian for details on how to access them, if you don’t know already.  I’d be interested to hear from you on what you learn.