User Reviews

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.

Directed by Marcus Imhoof, "More than Honey" attempts an investigation into our world's dwindling bee population. Not as interesting as the similarly themed "Vanishing of the Bees", Imhoof's film nevertheless does well to stress the importance of bees - an integral part of our ecosystem - to the survival of the human race.

"More than Honey" focuses on two beekeepers: Fred Jaggi, who lives in Switzerland, and John Miller, a Florida businessman. Both men adopt difficult approaches, Jaggi a traditionalist, Miller a hard-headed capitalist who lends his personal bee colonies to farms in need of pollination. Interviews with both occasionally give way to discussions with scientists and other beekeepers. Other subplots deal with bees being injected with hormones and pesticides, with parasitic mites penetrating bee colonies and with the many Chinese farmers forced to manually pollinate their crops. The film ends with surreal shots of bees flying off into outer space, suggestive of humanity's cosmic connection with even the smallest of organisms. Or perhaps the bees are simply abandoning us, finally ticked off with what we've forced them to endure.

8/10 – Worth one viewing.

This is a Swiss 90-minute documentary from 3 years ago and it deals from start to finish with honey farmers and the increasing problems in their profession. A lot of it has to do with the unexpected mass mortality of bees these days, for which there is no explanation. That is basically all there is to this documentary. If you are interested in bees, give it a watch, if not then stay away. There is nothing groundbreaking to see here really, but it's a solid, informative piece of filmmaking from start to finish. The writer and director is Markus Imhoof and he's been making movies since the 1970s already. He is way into his 70s now and maybe he retired after this documentary. At least he hasn't done any new films in the last 3 years and there is also nothing under the upcoming section of his body of work. "More than Honey" is actually more famous than I would have expected, because the topic is, in fact, really specific and I am fairly surprised this documentary reached such a great audience. Maybe this also has to do with the awards recognition they managed to get. It won Best Documentary for example at the German Film Awards and it got the honor to be Switzerland's official submission for the Acadmey Awards' foreign language category. Admittedly, a large part of the film is in English though. They follow bee farmers at several locations all around the world and one of them is the United States. So you will need no subtitles for this if you are a native English speaker. But you will for the rest. And even German speakers will need subtitles and not only for the English parts, also for the Swiss German segments as the old Swiss guy with the heavy beard speaks such a distinct version of Schwitzerdütsch that you will have no chance to understand what he is saying without subtitles. That's pretty much it. It's a decent documentary and all in all I recommend it.

Markus Imhoof made a most necessary documentary about major players in the life chain on earth: bees. He explains very clearly the organization inside a beehive, the evolution of bees as a species and their importance for our food in general.

The most important function in a beehive is finding food for the queen and the colony. Fascinating film stock shot by the German scientist Karl von Frisch explains the 'language' of the bees, how they can tell their sisters where they can find the land of plenty, at what angle they have to leave the hive and how they have to travel (their 'waggle dance').

The bee population on our planet is dwindling for all kind of reasons: monoculture, pesticides or 'political' measures. In China, Mao ordered his countrymen to kill all sparrows, because they stole grain from the people. But, sparrows live also on insects which are harmful for bees. The result was that in parts of China the bees disappeared. Human beings had (and have) to take over the bee job in order to fertilize their fruit trees. On the other hand, the bees as a species are fighting back. A new dominant bee variant erupted on the American continent: 'killer bees', whose hives 'cannot be reached even by a bear'.

This movie underlines impressively the very serious dangers of the dwindling bee population, which could lead to an agricultural catastrophe on earth. Urgent new research is needed to save one of man's main partners on earth. This documentary is a must see for all those interested in the future of mankind.