How to save our bees: cross-breed them with African 'killer bees' The film was something of a personal mission for Imhoof. "The bees fed our family," he explains in the narration, voiced by John Hurt in the English language version. His grandfather owned a fruit-canning factory in Zofingen, Switzerland, and it was bees that pollinated the pears, apricots and raspberries that went in those cans. "Lying in the grass in his garden, I could hear the bees buzzing," he says. But I didn't know that I was watching the flowers having sex... Now bees are "dying all over the world," the Imhoof family retains a personal stake. For at the University of Western Australia Imhoof's daughter, Barbara Baer-Imhoof, and son-in-law, Prof Boris Baer, are researching bees" immune systems in an effort to understand why they are dying and how they can be saved. Director Markus Imhoof with a remote controlled helicopter used to film swarms of bees in flight. PHOTO: Eureka Entertainment The crisis in the world's bee populations is well documented. In countries across Europe up to a quarter of honeybee colonies have disappeared in recent years. Julian Rees, who is the operations director of the International Bee Research Association, based near Cardiff, attributes the losses to a combination of pesticides, overwork by commercial beekeepers, parasites and climate change. "In addition, there has been loss of habitat - 97 to 98 per cent of appropriate plants [that is, those that bees can feed on] have been lost in the past 50 years," he says. Diseases to which bees are now succumbing include nosema (an intestinal parasite), wax moth (which destroys honeycomb), and foul brood (which kills larvae). But the bee's worst enemy is a blood-sucking mite the size of a rabbit, in comparative human terms, called Varroa destructor, which renders the bee susceptible to deformed wing virus, and is the main suspect behind Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), the term used in the US to denote empty, disease-ridden hives. The number of honeybee colonies in America has halved since the 1940s, and last winter nearly a third of hives fell victim to CCD. Why does this matter? Because 80 per cent of plant species need bees to pollinate them and, as the film reminds us, "one third of our food wouldn't exist without bees." According to Julian Rees, the value of bees to the British economy is up to £500 million annually, "at the farm gate." The retail value is up to £1 billion. "Without bees there is no life," Hermann, whose trust maintains 60 colonies in the Sussex countryside, says. They keep the world in fruit and flower. The fruits of the honeybee's labour. In More than Honey remarkable cinematography using high-speed cameras and endoscope lenses captures their mesmerising work. Plants "can't have child­ren on their own. What they need is a messenger of love - a bee," John Hurt intones as a honeybee flickers within the bell of a flower. Passing from flower to flower in search of nectar, the bee transfers male pollen on its fur, pollinating plant after plant. Birds do it, even educated fleas do it, but nothing does it better than bees. They are effectively unpaid labour on a colossal scale, facilitating the global food industry. Domesticated modern honeybees have become parts in a machine - which is why Imhoof likens his film to Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. More than Honey - a series of portraits of people engaged commercially or scientifically with bees - also has similarities to Al Gore's film on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth. "The global view of the problem is similar," Imhoof concedes, "but on the other hand I tried to be more emotional with my bees, which become more and more the protagonists of the film." He succeeded. Thanks to the camera work (a memorable sequence shows mid-air mating, after which the male drone falls dead to the ground, job done) and a haunting score that "developed out of the sound of bees," the viewer feels great tenderness towards these selfless creatures, as well as wonder: the film features a neurobiologist from the Freie Universität in Berlin, Prof Randolf Menzel, who has established that bees are capable of independent decision-making and suggests that a bee colony is a super-organism that has feelings. Mixing polemic with poetry, More than Honey is an impassioned plea for the Western world to change its industrialised bee-management practices. In one of the film's most striking scenes, a "migratory bee keeper" called John Miller, who keeps bees on an industrial scale, cocks an ear to the din of bees buzzing. He is sitting in his huge in the regimented almond orchards of California's Central Valley, which from the air resemble a ribbed carpet fitted to the horizon. "Can you hear that?" he says. That's the sound of money, fresh-printed money. Bees and trees. Nice. He does the maths. We've got 4,000 hives here at $150 a hive. That's $600,000. Each species of honeybee only fly to one type of plant. Miller drives his insects across the country so they can pollinate fruit trees. From California he - and several million bees - move on to Washington State, then North Dakota and back west, in an annual circuit of several thousand miles. On these pollination-fests 1.5 million bee colonies, two thirds of all the bees in the United States, interact, infecting one another with their own viruses and parasites. While the bees are pollinating, the fruit trees are sprayed with fungicides administered by tractors driven by men in anti-contamination suits. "Ideally they'd spray at night," Miller says ruefully. We see breed die-off and it's the fungicide at work. Pretty much everyone knows it. Many blame the use of neonicotinoids, nicotine-based chemicals that attack the nervous systems of insects. In April Imhoof attended screenings of More than Honey in Brussels before a vote in the European Parliament on whether to ban neonicotinoids. Fifteen of the 27 member states supported a ban (Britain voted against), and a two-year moratorium on their use was passed. "It was a crucial moment," Imhoof says. Outlawing chemicals is not the sole answer. More than Honey profiles a beekeeper in the Swiss Alps called Fred Jaggi, who boasts, like an Olympic athlete, that he is clean. Pure nature. No pesticides. No poisons. His bees are of a "local black breed," and he is proud of their racial purity. But, the birds and the bees being what they are, yellow bees from a nearby valley start buzzing around Jaggi's black beauties, and he fears one of his queens has been fertilised by a yellow drone. He exacts swift justice on his flighty queen, whom he calls "you little two-timer." He severs her head by using his thumbnail as a guillotine (how else to commit regicide?). Heidi Hermann of the Natural Beekeeping Trust. PHOTO: Kitty Gale But eugenics is always a filthy idea, and his bees fall victim to foul brood, probably as a result of inbreeding. As Jaggi commits bees and honeycombs to a pit of fire he appears to be crying, although it could be the smoke making his eyes water. In Austria Heidrun Singer and her daughter Liane make a living by subverting the process by which queens are produced - a common commercial practice. They take larvae that would ordinarily hatch into worker bees and put them in artificial royal chambers where bees feed them royal jelly (a secretion from the salivary glands) until they turn into parvenue queens that are prized for being both nonaggressive and highly productive. These monarchs are dabbed with nitrocellulose paint (usually used on cars) to identify them, packed in wood-and-wire cartridges and posted worldwide (to 58 countries) at €60 a pop. "We've unlocked the secrets of bee reproduction and thought, we're super-clever," Heidi Hermann says. But the genetic bottlenecking we have as a result is just staggering. In China nature-defying practices are almost second nature. During the so-called Great Leap Forward Mao Tse-tung instructed the populace to kill sparrows (which were eating grain), and the public response made the species almost extinct. The unforeseen consequence was that insects the sparrows had fed on proliferated, causing far more damage than the sparrows had done. More than Honey reveals that there are now regions of China where chemicals are so widely used that all the bees have disappeared and fruit trees are pollinated by hand, with dabbers like cotton buds, by vast armies of human workers. This nightmarish vision of what the future may hold across the planet prompts Imhoof to recall the verse in Genesis in which God tells Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it." He goes on to tell them they have dominion "over every living thing." Miller, the trucking beekeeper, puts it another way: "I don't know how to shrink a business or a lifestyle and be happy. That's not in my DNA. The US government still professes itself mystified by Colony Collapse Disorder. "Despite a number of claims in the general and scientific media, no cause of CCD has been identified by researchers," it states on the website of the Agricultural Research Service, part of the Department of Agriculture. To Imhoof and other observers it's as plain as a bee on your nose. Bees are not being killed off by pesticides, mites, exploitative husbandry, antibiotics, incest, climate change or loss of habitat, but by a perfect storm of all of these factors. They are victims of our "success." Man "has turned feral bees into docile domestic animals. Wolves into delicate poodles. Experts now believe that the only hope is for the bee to rediscover its inner wolf - that the killer bee's time is nigh. John Hurt narrates the film. Photo: Jonathan Hordle / Rex Fred Terry first encountered Africanised honeybees in Arizona in the early 1990s. They were descendants of 26 swarms that had escaped from a research facility near São Paulo in Brazil and migrated north, and they were, he recalls, "mean." So he introduced "a nice new queen" to the colony to calm them down. They killed her and raised their own queen. They were also immune to the parasitic mites devastating domesticated bee colonies. "If I were a gambling person, I would bet on the survival of African bees over any other species," Terry says in the film. I think they'll be here after we're gone. That's also the belief of scientists, led by Imhoof's daughter and son-in-law, currently working at the Centre for Integrative Bee Research at the University of Western Australia. This is the last refuge of healthy bees - a continent without the varroa mite - and when Imhoof visited, researchers burnt his protective suit in case it carried germs. Here, unlike in the US or Europe, honeybees can survive in the wild, without human help, and this healthy population represents a precious pool of genetic diversity. Thousands of bees scurry over a honeycomb frame. The sperm of these bees is being used to inseminate domesticated queens, with a view to producing a hybrid that is both hardy and human-friendly. "Killer bees have a better immune system - but we can't have wolves living among us," Prof Baer says in the film. We need to live side by side with the bees. We have no choice but to look for a compromise between killer bees and bees currently being bred, so we can live in harmony. This ground-breaking work is being carried out offshore, which may sound a little like The Island of Dr Moreau but is a precaution against what happened in São Paulo as well as a way of protecting the bees" disease-free status. "Since filming, things have progressed rapidly on several fronts," Prof Baer tells me. We know now our honeybees are very good at defending themselves. They produce highly efficient molecules to identify and kill parasites. We are on the way to identifying the genes responsible. Hermann, who agrees that the Africanised bee represents "the future," is sceptical of this approach. "I don't think we need to go into the laboratory to reinvent the bee," she says. I don't think science will answer our problem. Only a change of mind and conscience will do that. But no one disagrees on where we're heading unless something is done. A world without bees? A black-and-white world," says Imhoof, who once lay in his grandfather's garden listening to flowers making love.