Editorial Content - The Vanishing of the Bees

Imagine half a million adults skipping town and leaving their children behind. Picture an opened suitcase filled with bundles of cash at a bus stop and yet no robber wants to snatch it. The apiary science mystery known as "Colony Collapse Disorder" displays these very symptoms. Not only do the bees abandon their hive, but the queen and the brood as well. Unnatural. Unheard of. Even the predators that usually raid the hive for honey stay far away. At first, this occurrence sounds like an urban legend or an exaggerated tale. Except it's not. The situation is both dire and all too real. Bees are disappearing all over the planet and no one knows why.

Thousands of beekeepers around the globe have come out of the bee yard and admitted to the same problem, with some reporting losses of more than 90 percent of their colonies. And there are no dead bees to be found. It is estimated that CCD has resulted in the death of more than one quarter of the 2.4 million bee colonies in the United States alone. Throughout the rest of the world, the figures rise exponentially. Currently, agricultural department scientists and university researchers throughout the world are scrambling to figure out what is going on.

While some would like to blame a single factor, CCD is a quagmire that comes with a slew of possible culprits, including pesticides, genetically modified crops, stress from transporting bees, malnutrition from sugar and pesticide-spiked corn syrup, climate change, pollution, urbanization, re-queening and artificial insemination. As one prominent bee researcher has said, "this is the perfect storm for bees."

The Vanishing of the Bees, a feature-length documentary currently in production, takes a piercing investigative look at the economic, political and spiritual implications of the worldwide disappearance of the honeybee, a mysterious ecological tragedy that could topple our food chain and forever change our way of life.

From the dawn of human society, the nature and origin of the honeybee has awakened the curiosity and interest of man. In the past five million years, this furry insect has been a creature of special sanctity, representing many things such as the human soul, industry, cooperation and the sacred feminine. Pre-historic petroglyphs depict women on honey hunts and ancient Egyptian farmers floated beehives on rafts down the Nile to pollinate their crops.

Each winter beekeepers put away their hives and anxiously wait. Will their honeybees once again disappear without a trace? As the 2008 pollination season commences, there is no doubt that CCD is occurring again on an even greater scale-beekeepers are losing hives by the thousands and facing bankruptcy. The Vanishing of the Bees unfolds as a dramatic tale of science and mystery, illuminating this extraordinary crisis and its greater meaning about the relationship between humankind and mother earth.

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