Deep into this surprisingly
entertaining, exhaustive and, yes, at times exhausting eighty-three minutes on
the fate of the planet’s honey bees, a beekeeper wittily opines on the number
of stings it takes to kill a human being. That number turns out to be 500 or so
– about the same number of dingers that would have gotten you into baseball’s
hall of fame, pre-steroids. What the hell’s that got to do with the price of
honey at my Noe Street Farmer’s Market? It turns out that the bees, the food on
our plates, the air we inhale, or the sanctity of baseball’s once sacred
records are all threatened by the same mentality, that of an industrial combine
you might call agro-business, global economics, or the industrial/military
complex.
The sly filmmaker, here, Taggart
Siegel – whose The Real Dirt on Farmer John was a hit on the organic
farming circuit – feels that recent scuttlebutt on the disappearance of honey
bees or “Colony Collapse Disorder” should be a planetary wakeup call akin to
Rachel Carson’s Sixties pesticide expose Silent Spring. Siegel and his
delightfully eccentric cast of Anglo-American beekeepers – Hitchcock would have
loved this folks – are telling us in a hundred different ways that rather than
fret about Saturday Night Live’s killer bees’ gags we should realize
that we’re killing the bees. As one beekeeper puts it, without the bees,
there’s no agriculture. Bees are a vital link in the organic food chain. What’s
the problem? It seems that post-WWII agro-business and its obsession with mono
crops: corn, soybeans, wheat has disconnected the bees from their pollinating
duties. The queen of the hive – like the free range chicken – needs to roam
without constraints to perform her messy sex acts that keep the plants growing
and the honey flowing.
Queen of the Sun roams
across a few millenniums of bee history – there was edible honey found in the
Egyptian pyramids – and with vibrant, hypnotically colorful photography, silly
animation and a far-flung network of human bee fanatics -- demonstrates why
fewer artificial chemicals and more old fashioned patience – yoga helps the
aspiring beekeeper – we can keep farming this tired old planet, the sun
willing. Fewer chemicals may keep worker bees attending to their queens just
like fewer chemicals keep ballplayers’ heads from expanding and give us records
we can trust along with pure additive free honey sweetened ballpark treats.
And why five hundred stings to kill
a person? Honey bees excrete a diluted form of the poison contained in a
rattlesnake bite. There’s a funny, suspenseful, scary Hitchcock movie lurking
in all these sticky beats but hopefully the buzz from Queen of the Sun’s run
at the Roxie will be sweet enough.