If bees were to disappear from the globe, mankind would have four years left to live. That assertion, attributed to Albert Einstein but perhaps apocryphal, is voiced in “More Than Honey”, a fascinating but rambling documentary about the decimation of the world’s bee population through the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

 

Directed and written by Markus Imhoof, a Swiss filmmaker, the movie is a tutorial on the biology and social behavior of bees and their exploitation in the age of industrial agriculture. Mr. Imhoof is descended from a long line of Alpine beekeepers whose cultivation of bees and harvesting of their honey are still carried out in more or less traditional ways. The film approvingly contrasts Mr. Imhoof’s family tradition with the techniques of modern agribusiness in which bee colonies are trucked from place to place to pollinate enormous orchards.

 

If the film doesn’t directly blame colony collapse disorder on pesticides, it implies a strong connection. In a scene filmed in northern China, where pesticides are heavily used, bees have all but vanished, and peasants are reduced to laboriously importing pollen from the south and daubing it by hand on blossoms. Other contributing factors to bee depopulation are the varroa mite, which attaches to the bee and weakens it, and the stress of travel.

 

The most intriguing observations are those of Randolf Menzel, a German neurobiologist who views a bee colony as a single large animal. The worker bees make up the body, and the drone and the queen are male and female sexual organs. By this definition, a colony of 50,000 bees represents a single organism with nearly 500 billion nerve cells, as compared with the human brain’s 100 billion.