Summer First Harvest Moon
More Than Honey, a movie by a Markus Imhoff, is a cinematic marvel. He worked with 
special cameras and slowed speeds down so bee activity could be seen in a human time frame. He also followed bees with mini-helicopters and high speed cameras fitted to endoscopic lenses. As a result, you can clearly see the bee put out a rear leg as a rudder. You can see the telescoping proboscis that feeds the honey into the cell for storage. You can see the drone mate with a queen in mid-air, then fall to earth, dead.
Imhoff gives, in my opinion, the right answer to colony collapse disorder: insecticides, habitat loss, disease, mites, stress and inbreeding. It’s multi-factorial and therefore difficult to resolve. He also introduces us to two Americans who show two different sides of bee-keeping, one a North Dakota migratory bee-keeper, who trucks his bees in a circle summering in North Dakota for honey, then, for example, to California for the almond crops and after that Washington for the apples and apricots. The other is a Tucson bee-keeper who has begun to keep Africanized bees because their immune systems are stronger, they make great honey and they can live in harsh conditions.
Well worth seeing but only at the Lagoon for one week starting today.
When we came home, we watched another movie: Redemption. This is the story of Stan (Tookie) Williams, founder of the Crips. It follows his life in prison as he gradually changes from hardened thug to anti-gang activist through the medium, at first, of children’s books. A good movie, not a great movie. What it does do well is give a context for the rise of the Crips and the difficulty in reversing a life of unrelenting savagery.
