SRF 1: Mo­re than Ho­ney

More than a third of human food depends on pollination by bees. Albert Einstein is said to have said: "If the bees die out, four years later, people will die out too." For a few years now, entire bee colonies have been dying en masse. "More than Honey," the award-winning documentary by renowned feature film director Markus Imhoof ("The Boat is Full"), begins with a beekeeper in the Swiss mountains. From there, the film team traveled around the world: first to the USA, where bees are transported from monoculture to monoculture on an industrial scale, then to China, where in certain regions flowers already have to be pollinated by humans because there are no more bees. In Austria, a family breeds queens and sends them all over the world. Because if you want to get the bees to do what people want - namely, higher yields - you have to control the queens. Is this manipulation the key to explaining the mysterious mass extinction? So far, only the so-called killer bees, which owe their name to their high level of resilience and aggressiveness, have been spared. A beekeeper in the US state of Arizona who specialises in this type of honey says: "The killer bees will outlive us all." Radar images, thermal cameras, infrared and UV images, magnetic resonance, time-lapse, macro and satellite images are used. Using this overwhelming material, Imhoof tells of the phenomenal intelligence of bees and their social coexistence - whether inside a hive or during mating with a queen in flight. He interviews scientists, including his daughter and son-in-law, who are leading a research project on bees in Australia, where the great die-off has not yet arrived. Will there, on a lonely island in the Pacific, be the Noah's Ark of bees?