A gentleman in the Alps tends his bees the old-school way, waxing poetic about what bees do and keeping his hives in a special bee chalet. At a ginormous commercial beekeeping operation in the United States, adapted to industrialized agriculture, bees must be trucked in to pollinate miles-wide monoculture crops. In regions of China, they use so many chemicals that the bees have died out, and fruit tree blossoms must be pollinated by hand by humans. In More Than Honey, Swiss filmmaker Markus Imhoof sets out to look at the current state of the honeybee, traveling to Switzerland, the United States, China, and Australia to see what's happening and to determine why bees are disappearing.
The film begins with a vague buzzing sound that coalesces into a bee colony and the birth of a queen. The cinematography inside of the hive is wonderful: You can see the fur on each bee, bees working, bees communicating. Some scientists are studying hives as superorganisms—with each bee having a role and subordinating its individual needs for the benefit of the colony. Even the honeycomb itself is part of the system, transmitting information on the overall health of the hive to the bees' receptors.
More Than Honey covers the gamut: part family reminiscence, part close-up examination of bee culture and physiology, part report on modern-day beekeeping, part scientific bee study, part philosophical musing on industrial culture.
It's remarkable what bees give us; one-third of what we eat wouldn't exist without bees. The filmmaker reflects: "The plants are rooted to the ground—they can't run across the field and hug each other. They can't have children on their own. What they need is a messenger of love: a bee." This film made me want to drop everything and devote my life to beekeeping. 
