An unprecedented global examination of endangered honeybees spanning from California to Switzerland, China and Australia. With all the hallmarks of a great nature documentary, the film employs the latest in cinematic technology to observe phenomena undetectable by normal eyesight, beautifully portraying the dramatic story of the disappearance of millions of bees in the last decade.Writes Eric Kohn in Indiewire: "Imhoof captures the breeding of queen bees in minute detail, ventures to a laboratory to witness a bee brainscan, and discovers the dangerous prospects of a hive facing the infection of mites. In this latter case, the camera's magnifying power renders the infection in sci-fi terms, as if we've stumbled into a discarded scene from David Cronenberg's THE FLY." This is a strange and strangely moving film that raises questions of species survival in cosmic as well as apiary terms.
"[A] marvelous bee-centric documentary ...a delightful, informative, and suitably contemplative study of the bee world and the bee-population crisis"
Stephanie Zacharek, The Village Voice
"pectacularly beautiful"
Stephen Holden, New York Times
"It's a vibrantly absorbing trove of information, revealing things like the "Waggle Dance," discovered by Nobel Prize winner Karl von Frisch, the ingenious figure-eight movement bees perform to impart information about the directions and distance to vegetative sources of pollen and water and also housing locations."
