With exquisite cinematography, Queen of the Sun tells us about and shows us the magnificent virtues of honeybees, our destruction of them, and the attempts by many noble members of our species to save them.
The multiple answers to one of the film’s taglines, “What are the bees telling us?” can be quickly gleaned: We’re killing them, destroying our ecosphere, and, of course, ourselves.
More than once the film refers to the accurate prediction by Rudolf Steiner, in 1923, of what is now known as “Colony Collapse Disorder”. Bee authorities around the world document the human environmental practices that are destroying the colonies, and, in turn, threatening our increasingly fragile mass food production systems. And when there is a failure of anything that is ‘mass,’ the effects, of course, are also mass.
Like virtually every documentary covering food production and distribution, we learn of the domino-style damaging results of monoculture – growing only one crop over very large acreages, over long periods of time.
But all is not lost, of course. There’s a global movement to save honeybees, save the colonies, and save ourselves. Several of the interviewees tell, with utter humility and deep reverence, of their ‘biodynamic’ beekeeping methods. We learn of the growing number of backyard and rooftop beekeepers in cities and suburbs around the world. We observe a successful citizens initiative to legalize beekeeping in New York City.
Viewed via a Blu-ray player, Queen of the Sun is particularly beautiful.
