The Pollinators: This Film Only Matters if You Eat Food (1)
Bill Moyers talks with Peter Nelson, director of The Pollinators about the crucial role that bees play in everyone's daily life.
The film is available on all streaming platforms now
PETER NELSON: When I realized that the problems that bees were facing was not fully understood by most people, and the relationship to our food system was not really connected in a way that I had seen before, I thought, you know, I might be a good person to take a stab at telling this story. In the course of regular bee keeping I get stung maybe five, six, seven times a year. When I was shooting the film, I'd stopped counting.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Join Bill for a conversation with Peter Nelson about his film THE POLLINATORS, a top favorite at more than a dozen film festivals. The film is a cinematic journey around the US, following migratory beekeepers and their truckloads of honeybees as they pollinate the crops we all eat. The challenges that beekeepers and their bees face in their travels reveal the flaws to our simplified, chemically dependent agriculture system. Peter talks to farmers, scientists, chefs, and academics along the way to give a broad perspective about the threats to honeybees, what it means to our food security, and how we can improve it. Here's Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: Hey, Peter–
PETER NELSON: Hey, Bill. How you doin'?
BILL MOYERS: How did you know that bees were going to be so popular as a subject?
PETER NELSON: I found bees as a real great conversation starter with people. You know, if I told people that I was a beekeeper, they almost always had questions. And that was a great indication to me about people's interest and somewhat lack of knowledge about what's going on with the bees. Once I realized the connection to agriculture and then directly to our food system, I really thought that we were really onto somethin'– because most people know that there are problems facing bees. But very few people really understand what it is.
BILL MOYERS: When did you become a beekeeper? And why?
PETER NELSON: I started keeping bees a little over 30 years ago. And I grew up as what I refer to as a free-range kid. I lived in a rural area and I wanted to spend most of my days outside. And always had a real interest and passion for the natural world. So I was curious about what lived in that tree or under that rock. Or how things worked and the sorta cycles of nature. I was a birdwatcher and a collector of insects to some extent. And had some teachers along the way that really fostered that interest. Becoming a beekeeper was a hobby that I thought, “Hey, you know, I think I might be interested in this.” So I read a few books. And I jumped in with both feet. And, 30 years later I still love it. I go out in the bees and I get lost in it because it's endlessly fascinating and complex.
BILL MOYERS: Well, I grew up as a boy around a lotta bees. But I was so busy ducking them, I never really took a close look at them. And I never thought of bees as beautiful until I watched your film. You get such wonderful closeups. Suspended there in flight, fluttering wings, colors shimmering in the light. It's an incredibly beautiful little critter, isn't it?
PETER NELSON: They're so wonderful, they tend to be underappreciated. They are really, really, really beautiful animals. And they do such important work. And they're so interesting as an organism. One honey bee can't survive on itself. It needs its sisters and brothers in the hive to survive. And that's fascinating. They're in the same group with ants and termites, eusocial organisms. But honey bees are just one of many species of bees. There are 4,000 in North America. And they're each in their own way just beautiful and lovely and elegant creatures.
BILL MOYERS: What prompted you to make a film about bees?
PETER NELSON: Making this film was a combination of passions. I have an interest in the natural world, also cinematographer, as you know. And I also have a great interest in food and agriculture and those systems. Love gardening, very much interested in farming. We live in a rural area. I grew up in a rural area. And so that has always been of great interest to me. And I really wanted to put all these things together. And when I realized that the problems that bees were facing were not fully understood and the relationship to our food system was really not connected to that in a way that I had seen before, I thought, “You know, this might be a project that I could be a good person to take a stab at telling the story.” It started literally as a backyard project in our own hives. I identified characters that I thought could tell this story. And I wanted them to tell the story. We spent a little over a year traveling around the country. We hit 14 states in the process to meet up with beekeepers and farmers and scientists and environmentalists and chefs through a season of pollination. From February through the end of the year, through cranberry harvest when it was actually snowing when we filmed. I thought that was a good seasonal look at our food system. But people don't think about a bee necessarily with the apple that they're eating. But that's an intimate connection and an essential one. And so I wanted to try and bring that point home to people, about how important bees are to our food system. And then also about the threats against them.
BILL MOYERS: What should I think about when I see an apple in regard to a bee?
PETER NELSON: Most of our essential foods are pollinated by insects. And there're hundreds of everyday crops, from avocados to watermelons, that are pollinated by bees. And it's the most nutritious and tasty foods in our diet. The animal pollination, and it's much more than bees, it's also bats and hummingbirds and other insects are essential in moving that genetic material from one flower to another. And without that you can't form a seed or a fruit, which is what we really want to get from the plant. So, it really is an important, essential step in the process
BILL MOYERS: Dave Hackenberg, one of the characters in the film says, “One out of every three bites of food we take come from honey bee pollination?”
DAVE HACKENBERG: The reason them honey bees are here in the first place is to pollinate our crops you know cause one out of every three bites of food we put in our mouths comes from honey bee pollination.
PETER NELSON: It's a staggering number of things that are pollinated by bees in particular. And honey bees can pollinate a diverse group of flowers for fruits and vegetables and nuts. But they also have the unique ability that they go home to the hive at night. And you can pick that hive up and move it to a different location. And that is where the agricultural system has taken advantage of their unique abilities.
BILL MOYERS: I never knew that so many bees hit the road every night. I mean, did I get it right? Tens of billions transported back and forth from one end of the country to another?
PETER NELSON: Yeah. That is correct. And that's one of the things that I found really interesting about this story, was that most people don't realize this. Because the bees go back to the hive at night– and the beekeepers load up and move these bees around the country at night. And they often go to remote areas in the agricultural fields, orchards that most people don't pay attention to or have an opportunity to see. A semi load of honey bees – and they're all put on pallets as they're moved – can have 400 or more hives on it. And each hive has about, 25,000 bees. So you're talking millions, and millions of bees per truck.
BILL MOYERS: Are the bees sleeping while they travel?
PETER NELSON: They're not exactly sleeping. But what they do is when the trucks are moving, the bees tend to stay in the hive because of the air. And the whole truck is covered with a big net. So if you stop for very long, the bees will wanna get out. And so the truck drivers – they use truck drivers that are very adept at handling livestock. They move mostly at night. And keep on moving during the day so the bees don't come out. They choose their routes very carefully so that it's not too hot or too cold that the bees would get harmed in the process. In fact, that's what the USDA considers honey bees, is a form of livestock. And so, they're moved very quickly from one location to another. They can move 'em from Florida to California in just a couple of days.
BILL MOYERS: What would happen to our food system if all those trucks broke down and bees couldn't go any further than they can fly?
PETER NELSON: It would be a real problem because of the dependency upon these managed honey bees to our agricultural system. Many farms are growing specific monocultures of certain crops. And so bees cannot survive over a whole year in almonds because there's nothing else for the bees to eat after the almond bloom is gone. And so they have to move on to other forage, if you will.
BILL MOYERS: I ask myself as the story rolls forward, and you do tell a fascinating story about the bees and about agricultural and about the way the whole ecology of that system works, but I kept asking myself, “If bees are so beautiful and there are so many of them, are they really in trouble as you would have us think?”
PETER NELSON: I think they are. There's not one thing that is gonna take the bees down. And I don't think honey bees are going to go extinct. But the problem is that it's a multifaceted series of problems that these beekeepers are facing. From pesticides, to parasites, to habitat loss. One of those things, maybe the bees could handle. But all of them, it makes it really very difficult for the bees to overcome. Some of these beekeepers, their loss of hives every year to these different elements can be 30-50% or more, depending on where they are in the country. I don't know what business can sustain those types of losses, you know, a 40% loss every year. That's really hard on a business.
BILL MOYERS: Tell me about Dave and Davey Hackenberg.
PETER NELSON: Dave is a great beekeeper and his son Davey is stepping up and running the day to day operation of the beekeeping business now. Dave was the first beekeeper I went to ask if he wanted to be a part of the film. And, I met him at a truck stop on 495 and I sat on the back of his truck and I told him the story I wanted to tell, and he said, “Yup, I'm in.” And the beekeepers want their story to be told. They know that people are concerned about bees but they have trouble getting their message out to the average person because it is a complex story. And Dave has been keeping bees as long as I've been alive. And he started as a 4H or Future Farmer of America beekeeper when he was just in grade school. And now his son and his grandson are involved in the business. And they traveled the country. I don't think they went out to California this year.
