At the edge of a wildflower meadow sits an unassuming tan box with a pitched roof. But a closer look reveals the box is buzzing with activity — literally. The warmth of spring has awoken honeybees within this hive. Inside, a baby bee emerges from her wax cell, the first new bee of the year.
Worker Bee One, as she’s called, will have a sweet but brief life nurturing larvae and foraging for pollen and nectar. Her and her sisters’ efforts to produce enough honey for the coming winter are extensively documented in Secrets of the Bees, the latest in the Secrets of series from executive producer James Cameron.
Secrets of the Bees, as narrator and cinematographer Bertie Gregory puts it, reveals the “hidden world behind the buzz.” Though Worker Bee One and her hive anchor the two-episode series, their story is interwoven with those of other bees selected from more than 20,000 species around the world. Each episode is a charming love letter to the insects, highlighting their astonishing abilities as well as daunting perils. The series premieres March 31 on National Geographic, and April 1 on Disney+ and Hulu.
As Gregory walks through the meadow toward Worker Bee One’s hive, he laments having overlooked bees. “That was a mistake,” he says. “Despite their size, they might just be the most important animals on that planet.”
Secrets of the Bees claims that bees pollinate one in every three bites of food we eat — an oversimplified statistic that omits other types of pollinators. But that doesn’t undercut the documentary’s key message: Bees are crucial pollinators and an essential part of our world.
The first episode leans into awe and admiration, following Worker Bee One as she learns to construct iconic honeycomb structures and ventures out to find pollen and nectar to make honey. While her target is flowers, some bees look to unique places for their honey ingredients. The episode takes viewers to Ecuador, where vulture bees make honey using digested meat from a dead fish.
Other bees show off their smarts — learning to play with balls or solve puzzles in the lab, or using tools to throw off predators in the wild. The episode shows honeybees in Japan using leaves as a tool to throw attacking murder hornets off their hive’s scent. Scientists knew that some bees use animal feces to hide their hives, but Secrets of the Bees documents for the first time that leaves can serve the same purpose, says the series’ scientific advisor Samuel Ramsey, who is an entomologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “They have a higher level of [cognitive] processing than was originally expected,” he says.
The second episode shifts focus to existential dangers. In Ramsey’s lab, viewers are introduced to honeybees with unusually good hygiene habits, which could help in the fight against parasitic varroa mites. The mites infiltrate colonies and can transmit debilitating viruses to the bees, sometimes causing colonies to collapse. Bees usually don’t realize that they have an interloper, says Ramsey, who is working to understand how grooming affects resistance. “Seeing these bees just manage it,” he says, “really gives you a sense of hope that can be hard to find these days.”
Honeybees pose their own threats, too. Their excellent communication and teamwork skills mean that — outside of their natural ranges in parts of Europe, western Asia and Africa — they can outcompete many native bee species. To illustrate this, the episode transports viewers to a rooftop garden in London, where a male wool carder bee spends most of his time defending his territory from honeybees rather than finding a female to mate with.
Though honeybees are outsiders in most parts of the world, they have become an essential part of the environment. And their close relationship with people means that they can act as a canary in the coal mine when pollinators are in peril, Ramsey says. Up to a quarter of bee species are in decline. (Notably, the documentary doesn’t focus on the role that humans have played in bees’ decline via climate change, habitat loss and pesticides.)
Secrets of the Bees ends on a hopeful note, highlighting people who are stepping up to save the insects. Members of a Maya community in Mexico are rekindling the practice of keeping Melipona bees, a stingless species once found across the Yucatan Peninsula. And a beekeeper in Oregon has converted 450 acres of land into a wildflower meadow which not only helps his honeybees produce more honey, but also provides nourishment for the area’s native bees.
Overall, the documentary succeeds in its mission: appeal to our sense of wonder to make the case that bees are worth saving.
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