More Than Honey is a somewhat depressing documentary which offers a look behind the curtain at the real world of honey production. We see a Swiss farmer decapitating a live queen bee for the crime of ¨sleeping around¨. When foul broods are detected, the whole lot is subjected to sulfur gassing reminiscent of the holocaust. Then we have the Big Honey people who drive their hives around the United States in big trucks, renting them out like little hookers to farmers who need their crops to be pollinated. This itinerant worker lifestyle causes the bees a huge amount of stress, sometimes killing them en masse in the process, especially since they end up exposed to so many chemicals (pesticides) in the process. The bees are also administered drugs which weaken their constitution (both to fend off bacteria and mites, and to make them less aggressive). All of these chemical have clearly contributed to the large-scale demise of the bee as a species.
I had watched an episode of Rotten (Netflix) on honey, where I learned that much grocery store honey has been adulterated with substitutes such as rice syrup. Now I know why: producing honey is a very time-consuming, labor intensive and fragile enterprise. When producers are after lots of money, and buyers want their honey cheap, the simplest solution has been to dilute honey with other sweeteners. So if you are buying the least expensive honey in the store, or even any that is not certified, it is likely not 100% honey.
The tone of this film is reminiscent of something by Werner Herzog. Not only because of the German accents, but also because there is an undercurrent of doom and gloom throughout. The world is a place where human beings take what they want and do what they want and leave the consequences for future generations to deal with. Bees are just one chapter of this story.
I had watched an episode of Rotten (Netflix) on honey, where I learned that much grocery store honey has been adulterated with substitutes such as rice syrup. Now I know why: producing honey is a very time-consuming, labor intensive and fragile enterprise. When producers are after lots of money, and buyers want their honey cheap, the simplest solution has been to dilute honey with other sweeteners. So if you are buying the least expensive honey in the store, or even any that is not certified, it is likely not 100% honey.
The tone of this film is reminiscent of something by Werner Herzog. Not only because of the German accents, but also because there is an undercurrent of doom and gloom throughout. The world is a place where human beings take what they want and do what they want and leave the consequences for future generations to deal with. Bees are just one chapter of this story.