FILM REVIEW
sits, from forcefully managing hives to natural beekeeping that minimizes management and attempts to duplicate the conditions of feral colonies.
Beewildered Companions perspective, coming from the European tradition of beekeeping as craft rather than as an industry. It’s quite a different feel from a typical North American honey bee documentary, that invariably includes commercial beekeepers trucking thousands of colonies into almond orchards for pollination. Beewildered starts and ends in a very different place, with the Bashkir tradition of tree beekeeping, which is as natural as it gets. The Bashkir region lies in the
southern Ural mountains, where eastern Europe meets Asia. Bashkir tree beekeeping involves harvesting honey from wild colonies high up in tree cavities. Bashkir beekeepers manage their bees in the forest by climbing up and cutting through the tree trunk to allow access into a feral colony, and installing a removable wooden panel. Then, they periodically ascend the tree, open the panel, and cut honey from the comb, leaving enough for the colony to survive. It’s hard work, but about as natural as beekeeping can get. Beewildered then shifts to scientists disagreeing about whether honey bees are domesticated farm animals, or wild. animal” while a second indicates “The bee is clearly not domesticated. Farm animals such as cows, pigs, or chickens can be locked up. With the honey bee that’s not possible, the
“People keep saying whenever the beekeeper, the human,
intervenes, nature gets worse. I think that’s nonsense. What is natural, anyway? Tat’s a contested concept.”
topic: treatment vs. selecting for natural varroa resistance. The next hour or so meanders through beekeepers using the organic treatment formic acid, scientists breeding bees to select for resistance to varroa, and a third group that supports the harshest form of selection, leaving colonies untreated to beekeepers harvesting honey in the wild, leaving us with the impression that returning to more natural beekeeping would be the optimal solution to varroa. There’s much to recommend Beewildered, particularly some beautiful photography with close-ups of bees, including a few slow-motion sequences through smoker haze, like soft-core bee porn. There are also some apiary shots of common management practices with an underlay of casual conversations between beekeepers at work, a few requisite scenes of scientists and microscopes, and the impressive tree climbing and harvesting skills of the Bashkir beekeepers in the forests of the Ural Mountains. Beewildered is very much a beekeeping folk tale, and in that way is particularly
interesting for a North American audience more accustomed to beekeeping as functional rather than artistic.
repetitive, and isn’t very direct about the point it’s trying to make, so viewers are left with inference rather than information. There are quite a few beekeepers and scientists substantive information about the feasibility and success of the live-or-die system of selecting for resistance to varroa. That lack of hard information is unfortunate, because there are vital issues that could have been more clearly
Above left: Bees on comb being inspected for varroa mites. Above right: A Bashkir beekeeper climbing to harvest honey from a nest inhabitaing a cavity high up in the tree.
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