THE LAST BEEKEEPER - GREEN PLANET TV

Meet Fenton Bailey, Producer of The Last Beekeeper

Rachel Cernansky

By Rachel Cernansky | Wed Sep 9, 2009 11:20

Fenton Bailey

Valerie Macon/WireImage/Getty Images

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Animals | Endangered Species | Farmers Market | Honey | Insects

I recently had a chance to talk with Fenton Bailey, producer of The Last Beekeeper

The Last Beekeeper considers colony collapse disorder and follows the pilgrimage of the bees and beekeepers to the largest beekeeping event of the year--the mass pollination of California's almonds. Here's what the film's producer had to say about the documentary and the process of making it.

Planet Green: What surprised you the most while working on the film?
Fenton Bailey: What was surprising was just how connected one felt with the bees--because they are just insects, but like the beekeepers, it's amazing how quickly you sort of form this bond with them. You didn't expect that to happen.

They're very complicated creatures. They live in these socialized environments, and they have incredible communication systems, they look after each other. It's kind of breathtaking to see, and especially heartbreaking to see a bee that is sick or disoriented or dying.

PG: How did you get started working on a film about this issue?
FB: Stories started surfacing in the newspaper a few years ago about this massive die-off and I think it lept out at me because it was right around the time of An Inconvenient Truth: a lot of grassroots activity trying to get people more conscious about the planet and here amongst all that going on, was this singular story. And scientists are trying to figure out why the bees are dying, and to me, it was less about figuring out the problem and solving it, than it was about I suppose the poetry of the point we have come to as a society, and the kind of brilliance of our technology-based and consumer-based society.

We all lead aspirational and convenient lives on the one hand, but on the other hand, have all these less identified disadvantages and it felt that all that came together in the story of the bees. As we researched it, that became clearer to me, because there wasn't a single cause that could be solved with a single technological fix. It was an accumulation of problems. The bees are getting sick from multiple stresses placed upon them.

In a way, the problem is the life we make them lead and that was fascinating to me: a metaphor for where we are as a society, and actually the same kind of sickness that's affecting the bees is weirdly affecting us as humans--we are ridiculously stressed out, we are semi-poisoned by the food we eat, we aren't getting enough sleep, we are working too hard. In our drive to succeed, in our drive to compete, in our drive to accumulate, we are leading a life that's slightly out of balance. So it felt a very powerful illustration of something that's fundamentally wrong.

PG: Does that message come across in the film?
FB: World of Wonder is not a company known for its activist film-making. We say here's something that fascinates us, or here's a problem or a situation. So maybe people get that message from it, maybe they don't. I think it's hard to watch the film and not come away feeling a profound connection with the bees. And I think if that's all the film achieves, then it's succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, because that sense of who we are in relation to the world around us is very important, and I think a lack of that connection is still a huge problem.

PG: What can people do to help the bees?
FB: What you can do about it, if you want, is go and get a hive and stick it at the bottom of your garden--it's a bit like keeping a pet. The beekeepers that we met, they care passionately about their bees, they're not just some sort of industrial widget that they keep in boxes that make honey. They really love their bees and have this incredible connection.

It's funny to see a grown man, a tough, hardened grown man cry about his bees. It's very unexpected, and I don't think you need to take up the political cause necessarily, I think it's just incredibly fun to keep bees because they're incredibly rewarding things to keep, in the same way that people find having a dog very sustaining.

What's been very exciting to see is people taking up beekeeping and taking up the cause of the bees and trying to do something with the bees in a sort of grassroots way.

PG: That tough, hardened man you mentioned--what had gotten him so upset?
FB: His hives had just disappeared. He's a beekeeper so he makes his living and supports his wife and his kids from beekeeping, so you go out and look at your hives and 80 percent of them have disappeared, that's like a big oh-shit moment. And on the one hand, he can't put bread on his table, but on the other hand, in fact it's a tragedy--just as if anything you love and care about, if you woke up one morning and it was gone, you would have a huge sense of loss.

PG: The hives disappear that suddenly?
FB: It happens that suddenly, yeah. One minute they're there, and the next minute they're gone. It's the rapture of bees.

PG: What is the human role in the problem?
FB: The plight of the bees is entirely one created by humans, in that bees used to live in trees and they made their own hives and they flew around and it was great for them, they were happy about it. But a couple things have happened, we've basically industrialized bees and a number of pollinations, a number of fruits, like seedless fruits, you don't want bees cross-pollinating, you don't want bees just flying around, you want to control the pollination. Also, instead of just sitting around in their fields (and normally they hibernate during winter), what happens is they get put on the back of trucks, they get driven all over the country, then they get woken up and made to pollinate a whole bunch of almonds, then they get put back in their hives, put back on the truck, driven across country and made to pollinate a whole bunch of blueberries--rather than just being free, trying to fly around, do their thing, eat a bit of this, eat a bit of that, have a healthy mixed, balanced diet, have a bit of a rest. It's just like humans.

More on The Last Beekeeper and Beekeeping:
Meet Jeremy Simmons, Director of The Last Beekeeper
Green Your Yard, Part 2: Rethinking the Backyard
Save the Bees! Grow Garden Plants Honey Bees Love
Blogger Writes About Bee Colony Collapse Disorder in his Backyard