Original subtitles

(bees buzzing)

(solemn music)

(footsteps thudding)

(bees buzzing)

(ax thudding) (bees buzzing)

(bees buzzing)

(door creaking)

The bees fed our family.

They were a part of my grandfather's cannery.

They pollinated the raspberries,

pears and apricots and his orchards

and also the cucumbers.

I loved my grandfather for all the animals he had,

horses, dogs, birds, even a roebuck.

But what he loved most were his bees.

He had 150 bee colonies.

He even built a special house for them.

Lying in the grass in his garden,

I could hear the bees buzzing.

But I didn't know that I was

watching the flowers having sex.

The plants, my grandfather explained,

are rooted to the ground.

They can't run across the field and hug each other.

But they can't have children on their own.

What they need is a messenger of love, a bee.

To attract a bee, the plants produce sweet nectar.

The bee drinks from one flower and flies to the next,

taking along male pollen on its fur.

(bees buzzing)

So, while looking for food,

it pollinates plant after plant.

And each plant starts to bear fruit.

(gentle music)

My grandfather was a patriarch

of gardens and bees, people and machines.

He was fascinated by how everything interacted.

But the bees are in trouble, now.

A few years ago they started dying.

Not just our bees.

They're dying all over the world.

The news is full of reports.

They say it's a mystery.

I take to the road, to find out why.

The bloom is nearly full now.

It's just such a gorgeous time of year to be out here.

I mean it's just beautiful.

And no one sees this.

The bee guy sees it, the almond guy sees it.

Listen.

(bees buzzing)

Can you hear that?

That's the sound of money.

Fresh printed money.

Bees and trees.

Nice.

Ladies, how are you today?

Ah, you're busy.

It's warm, it's sunny.

An old maid.

It's a nut that didn't get shaken and didn't get hulled.

And right there,

there, yum!

Delicious.

1/3 of our food

wouldn't exist without bees.

My grandfather explained their secret to me.

Colorful and fragrant plants are pollinated by insects.

The plain and dry ones, by the wind.

(gentle music)

(bees buzzing)

The apricots and raspberries, on the jam labels,

were printed by my grandfather.

His competitors were more efficient.

They had the fruit delivered by rail.

My grandfather went bankrupt.

All he had left were his bees.

(bees buzzing)

They still brought him the nectar,

but, the apples grew in a paradise he had lost.

It's sort of a Faustian deal

that we made with the almond growers.

We know, going in,

that there are risks and opportunities,

in the almond orchards.

You know, they pay a lot of money.

I mean, you know, it's no mystery.

We've got 4,000 hives here at $150 a hive, that's $600,000.

To me that's real money.

(airplane whirling)

That might be Joe Mack.

He might be flying down to Bakersfield today.

I think California produces 80%, maybe a little more,

of the world production in almonds.

In terms of the almonds

that are actually in trade in the world,

it's higher than that.

It may be close to 90%.

(machines creaking)

It's not commercial to grow almonds on a very small scale.

I know of no reason why that system

will not be sustainable for the long term.

There's nothing that I've seen,

in my 35 years in the industry,

which would lead me to think that

that concentration of almonds in one area is

self-defeating in some way.

That it will somehow crash

as a result of being concentrated.

I've seen nothing to that, to indicate that.

(airplane whirling)

We would not have a business without bees.

Without some type of insect pollinator

almonds won't set any crop whatsoever.

We've proven that again and again.

So our business relies entirely upon pollination by bees.

(bees buzzing)

Unlike bumblebees and butterflies,

bees remain true to one type of flower.

Some bees fly only to apples, others, only to bellflowers.

They don't fly to a different type

until they've finished the work they started.

But here they have no choice.

There are only almond trees.

(bees buzzing)

(solemn music)

Inside the hive the bees hand over

the nectar to their sisters,

who chew on it, until it turns into honey,

and store it in empty honeycomb cells.

(solemn music)

They put the pollen into pollen baskets,

and store it as a protein reserve.

But the returning bees bring back even more information.

When I was at school, we watched a silent movie,

The Dances of Bees.

It was directed by Karl von Frisch,

a scientist who received the Nobel Prize

for discovering the waggle dance.

Bees, he discovered, use the dance

to communicate to their sisters

the distance to the best flowers

and the direction to fly in.

The faster they waggle, the closer the food source.

In the darkness of the cinema, the bees were so annoying.

It was so hard to comprehend their geometry.

They were so awfully clever and complicated.

(solemn music)

At the Freie Universitat, Berlin,

Professor Menzel is studying the question

of whether bees can make decisions.

His experiment poses a dilemma for the bees.

They already know a food source.

But receive information from another bee

about a second, perhaps better, feeding site.

What to do?

(bee buzzing)

(bee buzzing) (radar beeping)

(bee buzzing) (radar beeping)

(bee buzzing)

(radar beeping)

(bee buzzing) (radar beeping)

(bee buzzing) (radar beeping)

She's a lovely little insect.

Very tolerant.

Not very smart, but really tolerant.

(bees buzzing)

Two weeks from today,

It may look like an orchard to us,

but to them it looks like a desert.

There's nothing to eat.

The almond grower will call me and say,

"The bloom is over you may now go."

So we do go

because if we leave the bees here, they'll starve.

We're about to be run over.

(machine rumbling)

(speaking foreign language) Ribbon?

Okay.

(speaks in foreign language)

Thank you.

He's starting from the other ribbon.

So maybe he'll go a little ways away.

If they'll just not spray the bees,

that's great, you know?

That's great.

'Cause it really,

you know, ideally they'd spray at night,

when the bees are in.

By the time the material is dry, and isn't so lethal,

it's the next day.

If they'd just spray it at night.

But, you know, you can't see at night.

They don't know where they are.

These fields are massive, they get lost.

So, they're going to do what they're going to do.

It doesn't kill the bees.

But it repels the bees.

If after this material has dried on the bloom,

the bees bring that material back to the colony

and feed it to the babies,

19 days later we see an impact on the brood.

We see brood die-off and it's the fungicide at work.

Pretty much everybody knows it.

(machine rumbling)

That's the only two motivations

in life my friends, greed and fear.

I don't know how to shrink a business

or a lifestyle and be happy.

That's not in my DNA.

It's like, we're capitalists, we wanna grow.

Total global domination. (laughs)

(solemn music)

(bees buzzing)

(bees buzzing)

(birds chirping)

(speaking in foreign language)

Mating in the air with drones

from other colonies,

not in the hive with the bee's brothers,

is an ingenious way of protecting against incest.

(solemn music)

The queen is the mother of all 50,000 bees in the hive.

She lays up to 2,000 eggs a day,

the equivalent of her own body mass.

The other bees tend to her needs,

care for her, feed and clean her.

When she dies, the bees must raise a new queen.

The process is risky and takes a whole month.

The queen can lay infertile eggs

that develop into drones, male bees,

or fertile eggs from which female, worker bees emerge.

The eggs hatch into larvae,

which are fed by the bees with nectar and pollen.

Then, they seal the lid.

The larva pupates,

and three weeks later a worker bee emerges.

(solemn music)

The fat, male drones take three days longer.

They'll be fed their whole life long by the worker bees,

in order to build up their strength for the daily flights.

They leave every afternoon, around 2:00 p.m.,

in the hope of meeting a princess mid-air.

Those who don't get a chance, on the honeymoon flight,

are killed by the worker bees in the fall.

In winter, drones would just be useless mouths to feed.

(bees buzzing)

My grandfather's honey is not a gift

from the bees, after all.

My grandfather steals the honey from the bees,

and gives them sugar water to store for the winter, instead.

Like the glass beads the Indians received

in payment for their gold.

Even more ingeniously,

grandfather manipulates them by breeding queens,

that increase the bees' docility and diligence.

More profit, fewer stings.

If you want to command the bees

you have to command the queen.

She's the key.

The bees decide when they want a new queen.

And build up a special cell for her.

Before the princess hatches,

the old queen swarms out with the old bees,

and leaves the hive to the younger generation.

The colony turns into two.

Breeders interfere with this process.

They take the queen away,

which forces the colony to raise a new one.

But the new queen is queen by the breeder's grace.

(bees buzzing)

The nurse colony is nervous,

Good!

It has been manipulated by the beekeeper

and has neither a queen, nor brood.

(solemn music)

The bees urgently need a new mother for the offspring,

or else the colony will be dead within a few weeks.

They only need one queen.

But in their distress they tend to all

the 51 larvae that Heaven has sent them

They feed them with royal jelly

and build queen cells around them.

(solemn music)

The first queen that hatches

will kill the other ones in their cells.

There can only be one queen in the colony.

That's why the cells have to be harvested

and placed in queenless colonies before they hatch.

(bees buzzing)

(gentle music)

(bees buzzing)

The drone dies during the mating ceremony.

When the queen returns from her maiden flight,

she keeps five million sperms in her sperm bag.

In there they can stay alive for eight years.

(beekeeper laughs)

Singer queens are sold to 58 countries,

as well as artificial swarms,

four to six pounds of loose bees in a box,

with a separately packed queen.

(carts rattling)

(bees buzzing)

There you go.

(gentle music)

(machine whirling)

(airplane whirling)

Before the settlers came,

there weren't any honey bees in America.

But the colonists wanted to cultivate the prairie

and grow fruit and vegetables.

To pollinate them, they needed bees.

New colonies have to be imported

or cultivated on a regular basis.

(bees buzzing)

(machines whirling)

(machines beeping)

I am a migratory beekeeper.

In practice it means we go where the bees

have the most opportunity to thrive.

That takes us across America.

In the course of a year we go from California,

where the almonds and cherries begin the season,

in early, early spring, February.

We then go to Washington State

for apple pollination, apricot pollination,

cherry pollination in late March and April.

We move the entire outfit to North Dakota for summer.

All the bees go for honey production in the summer.

By October 1st, we've begun to close the circle

moving the colonies back west before winter.

So in the course of a year it's one big circle.

(solemn music)

It's a little under 1700 miles,

from California to North Dakota.

We try to transport the bees in two days

and spend one night on the road.

The less time the bees spend on the truck,

the better and healthier they'll be.

The bees can't fly outside their hive

when we're trucking them to, like, go to the bathroom.

So, the longer they have to stay in their box,

and hold their potty the more unhealthy they'll be.

And it's stressful, and it's just,

it's not natural for the bees to be on a truck.

The sooner we get them off the truck,

the better it's gonna be.

(solemn music)

(truck rumbling)

The breaks are short.

Without any airstream, it gets too hot inside the boxes.

On the plantations,

one and a half million bee colonies interact,

2/3 of all the bees in the USA,

and they infect each other with diseases and parasites.

The diseases travel along with them

all the way across America.

(solemn music)

Nosema is an intestinal parasite

and eats the bee from the inside.

Wax moths destroy the honeycomb.

Foulbrood kills the larvae.

But the most dangerous of all is a mite.

Its name is Varroa Destructor.

His brooding site is the bee's own brood cells.

The young mites infest the larvae,

as well as cling to adult bees,

ram their jaws between the rings of the bee's body,

and suck the bee's blood.

In the human world,

these bloodsuckers would be the size of a rabbit.

Viruses invade the body through the open wounds,

deforming the bee's wings.

(solemn music)

Hm.

Okay, there's very few bees here.

This is trouble.

So let's have a look, there are no bees.

This is what we don't like.

Classic colony collapse disorder.

A queen,

20 friends,

and nothing else.

This is a total loss and we don't know why.

Just, just gone!

Plenty of pollen, plenty of nectar,

no evidence of brood.

I'm getting real comfortable with death on an epic scale.

I don't like it.

(bees buzzing)

It doesn't burn and it doesn't sting like it used to.

You know, it used to be like,

oh God, it's a death in the family

and now it's just something we gotta fix.

It's just, you know, I gotta fix it.

I don't have time to take it personally.

I know this hive didn't mean to die.

I don't know why it died.

But I can't fix it,

I just gotta move on.

You know, I can't mourn the loss of this hive.

It's just part of the game.

Hey, we got 365 out of 456.

456? 456 in-bound.

It's right at 20%.

[Beekeeper With Yellow Suit] That's our worst load.

Yeah, the worst one yet.

But the ones that are here look good.

So, hopefully the next ones aren't that bad.

That's 90 duds.

[Beekeeper In White Suit] 91.

[Beekeeper In Yellow Suit] I am backed into a corner

and I fight back with what I have, chemicals.

(machine rumbling)

(truck rumbling)

After the stressful journey

the bees are given sugar water, mixed with antibiotics.

In Europe, North America and China

the honeybee can no longer survive without drugs.

(water sloshing)

(speaking in foreign language)

But the 50,000 little brains

network in a super-organism,

which is more than just a bustling brown mass.

It's 50,000 members of a family,

the population of a medium sized town.

Each bee, depending on its age, has a designated role.

No one give commands, and yet, everyone obeys.

Even the honeycomb is a part of this sophisticated system.

A communication network, full of information,

passed on, in the dark hive odors.

I can imagine what a colorblind person misses out on,

but not, what the world looks like through one's nose.

The bees have 60,000 smell receptors

on each of their antennae,

which allows them to smell in stereo.

They also have gustatory hair on their legs.

As they walk across the honeycomb,

they receive a 3 dimensional odor-image

of the colony's condition.

Where's the queen?

Are enough eggs being laid?

Are sufficient stocks being stored?

Without its colony the individual bee cannot survive.

It must subordinate its personal freedom

for the good of the colony.

In each bee family, up to 2,000 bees die, every day

and 2,000 new ones are born.

Could it be, that the individual bees

are like the organs or cells of a body?

Is the super-oganisim, as a whole, the actual animal?

(bees buzzing) (machines clanking)

(solemn music)

When the bees swarm out

the colony is divided into two.

The commercial beekeeper beats the bees to it

and turns one colony into four, to replace dead colonies.

Brood.

Honey.

Eggs.

♪ Oh, everybody needs somebody that they can talk to ♪

♪ Someone to open up their ears ♪

♪ And let their trouble through ♪

♪ Now you don't have to sympathize ♪

♪ Or care what they might do ♪

♪ But everybody needs somebody ♪

♪ That they can talk to ♪

Each colony is split up.

Eggs, brood and honeycomb are uncrated

into four empty boxes like spare parts,

thus mixing brood with other colonies.

Most of the queens die in the process.

New queens are delivered by FedEx, and placed in the hives.

(bees buzzing)

(beekeeper groaning)

Things have changed rapidly.

We don't keep bees the way my dad did.

My grandfather would probably

walk from this property disturbed.

If he saw the way we keep bees today,

he'd think, my God, you have lost your soul,

in the husbandry of the hive

and the care and the compassion in the keeping of the hive.

He'd say we've sacrificed our relationship with the colony.

But it was probably easier to maintain

that relationship with the hive.

Because he was running, what, 1500 hives?

We're running ten times that.

You know, we have ten times the employees,

we have ten times the property,

we have ten times the square foot of plant and equipment.

We have ten times the trucks with ten times the power,

at ten times the cost.

(solemn music)

(horn beeps)

(speaks in foreign language)

The black bees have raised

a new queen without yellow stripes.

On her mating flight she never left the narrow valley.

Her daughters are, once again, racially pure.

(bees buzzing)

(fire crackling)

(solemn music)

(speaking in foreign language)

Mao once ordered that the sparrows be killed,

because they rob the people of grain.

Billions of sparrows were killed.

The result was a plague of insects.

(bell dings)

It was fought with insecticides.

The bees also fell victim.

(people chattering)

Rumor has it that Einstein once said,

if the bees ever die out,

mankind will follow 4 years later.

I take a trip to the future.

I'm astonished to find regions in China

where they use so many chemicals

that all bees have disappeared.

They're not sure whether to let me watch or not.

(peaceful music)

No other country can afford to ask itself the question

currently being posed at The University of Beijing,

who's better at pollinating, man or bees?

Science answers with a definite, not man!

(bees buzzing)

Here's what we've worked for all summer long.

We see this abundance of honey, beautiful!

Beautiful, summer honey.

It's done, off, off!

Hey!

Mine!

They don't like sharing too much.

My thought was, taste it.

Yeah, that's good.

That's real good, that's why it's straight out of the hive.

It's traumatic, it's hard on them.

They don't understand it.

They've been flying in the fields for months undisturbed,

and now suddenly someone came and blew smoke in their face,

and took the boxes off and scraped their top bars,

and handled them roughly, and now the lid's back on,

and the hive is a lot smaller than it used to be.

(machines whirling)

(metal clanking)

(machines whirling)

It's a four to five week lifespan.

A single bee produces about one teaspoon of honey.

For two pounds of honey a colony has to fly

three times around the world.

Bees filter out the toxins with their own bodies.

They sacrifice themselves so that the brood eats

only the purest of honey.

But traces of pesticides probably remain.

(truck rumbling)

(machines whirling)

(machines beeping)

How many Chinese migrant workers

does it take to replace the bees?

It took four billion bees a whole month,

to produce these mountains of almonds.

Even vegetarians depend on industrial animal husbandry.

What's causing the bees to die?

Looking for clues,

I come across the divine promise of growth,

we learned in Sunday school.

Be fruitful and multiply.

Fill the earth and subdue it.

The massive death of bees is no mystery.

What's killing them is not pesticides,

mites, antibiotics, incest or stress,

but a combination of all those factors.

They are dying as a result of our civilization's success.

As a result of man, who has turned feral bees

into docile domestic animals, wolves, into delicate poodles.

But why do the bees put up with it?

(gentle music)

We flew around the world four times to make this film.

On one of the last flights, while looking out of the window,

I remembered a story from Alice in Wonderland.

The story of the Red Queen.

The Red Queen grabs Alice by the hand

and runs off with her,

and on, until Alice is gasping for air.

Faster, faster, the Queen cries.

The wind almost blows the hair off Alice's head,

but the world around her stands still.

As if the trees and buildings were running, too.

Faster, the Red Queen cries out,

until Alice falls down exhausted.

She looks around and says,

But we've been under this tree the whole time!

Everything, just as it was!

Of course it is, the Red Queen replies,

It takes all the running you can do,

to keep in the same place.

(solemn music)

(sires blaring)

One of the first people to pull up

to the scene, the Lakeville Fire Chief,

couldn't figure out why there was

a cloud around the accident,

when there was nothing on fire.

There was a haze, a black haze, around the whole scene.

And I was, I just have never quite seen anything like that.

Didn't know he drove

right into a swarm of bees.

Stung in the face a few times,

immediately he ordered his crews

to wear full turn-out gear for protection.

14 people have died in the US since 2004,

after being attacked by swarms of killer bees.

Killer bees first escaped

from a Brazilian breeding experiment,

then, migrated through Central America and Mexico.

Along the way getting a deadly reputation;

allegedly killing hundreds of people.

Killer bees are a cross

between European and African bees.

Their correct name is Africanized honeybee.

26 swarms escaped from a lab in the University of Sao Paolo.

Are the bees finally striking back?

Or are they helpless in the hour of need?

Hey RenB! Hey, Fred!

Came to get your bees.

So, gonna have to take off this soffit here.

You did say, I get a suit, right?

Yeah, you'll get a suit. Well, alright, Fred!

You're my friend!

(Fred and Rebo laughing)

In 1992 a local minister called me to his home.

He said, "I want you to come get my bees",

because his neighbor had put in

an exercise ring for his horses.

And so the bees that were on

his property were stinging the horses,

and the people on the horses,

because the horses were making a lot of noise

and vibrating the earth,

and of course bees don't like that.

So, I went over dressed like this,

with no protection whatsoever,

I think I wearing a short-sleeve shirt,

because I was used to working with the European bees,

and I thought that this won't be too big of a problem.

But, I got over there, and of course it was.

The bees were much more ferocious

than any I'd ever seen previously.

I wasn't sure exactly what they were,

but I thought, well what I'll do is,

I'll find the queens

and I'll put in nice new queens,

because these bees were just too mean.

And so, I put in a gentle queen

and the bees killed her, immediately, killed her,

and they raise their own queen.

It's always a good idea to pee first.

Okay. Yeah,

before we get the bees excited.

Oh, yeah! So if you need to go,

now is the time.

No, I think I'm pretty good.

You're pretty good?

Okay. Yeah, I think so.

(drill whirling)

(bees buzzing)

Ready Fred? Ready.

Move it down, just a tad.

Beautiful, beautiful nest.

Yeah, it is.

Look at that, perfect rows.

Yeah.

They filled the cavity.

Yeah Rebo, these are your killer bees.

The honey flow's been on.

You can see that comb's real fresh

and the stuff further back is brood combs.

Yeah.

Look at it!

That's beautiful.

Looks good, even in the bucket.

You know, Rebo, if you'd lived in Tucson 15 years ago,

somebody might have charged you $1,000, to take this out.

(Rebo laughs)

At the time I had mites, parasitic mites.

And so I thought, these really vicious hives,

I won't treat them and so the mites will kill them.

The mites did not kill them.

These hives thrived with no treatment,

whereas my gentle, treated hives

did not do very well at all.

And so I began to think,

maybe there's something to these bees.

At that time I was thinking, maybe these were African bees.

I didn't tell anyone

because I was afraid of what might happen if I did.

(bees buzzing)

It's a nice brood.

Now this-- Oh yeah,

the yellow is a good brood. Yeah where is our box, Rebo?

See it? Yeah.

Oh, I see that's

what the string is for. Yeah that's what

the string is for.

That's what the bears

get in the hives for, huh, Fred?

Yep.

Not looking for the honey,

they're looking for the brood.

There we go.

Want to pour 'em in the hives?

Yeah, let's pour 'em in.

The queen may well be in this bunch right here.

The lid on.

It's quite a bit heavier

than just the honey that we put in there.

Yeah.

It's amazing how much a few bees weigh.

Let's put it just on the edge here.

Wanna make sure,

scoot 'em off the bottom. Bees, yeah.

There any bees on the bottom?

Not many.

Okay, good. Do a sweep.

I think we're in good shape.

(truck rumbling)

Oh, American are always afraid of being invaded!

If not, illegal immigrants, then, killer bees.

(solemn music)

(bees buzzing)

I do have to wear a bee suit, now.

I do have to have to work my bees much more carefully.

But it's easily worth it.

I know that they do make more honey.

And they make honey that doesn't

have any chemicals in it.

So that means an awful lot to me.

(bees buzzing)

Looking good!

Lots of drones.

The bees are not really native to Australia.

They arrived with the first settlers.

And over time some of them, of course, escaped.

And they got established.

So we have honeybees can survive without any human help.

which is very different from Europe,

China, and northern America.

So if we collect males,

that's what is Rodolfo doing up there at the moment,

we can basically study the queen genes,

because the males are clone variants of the queen.

And I always refer to our feral bees

here in Australia as a big bank account,

A bank account where you don't have money on it,

you have basically genetic variations of genes on it

and with the work which we do here at the moment

we basically try to withdraw some of our assets,

and we use them for future bee breeding.

Well done.

Alright.

Can we have a look?

Yep.

Here you go. Ah, excellent.

Look, look at this.

It's really nice.

Oh my God.

Yeah, they're very lively.

(speaks in foreign language)

The bees still have a grip on my family.

Now my grandchildren are fascinated by them.

What will they be eating

when they themselves become grandfathers?

(bees buzzing)

My daughter and son-in-law

are doing research on the bee's immune system,

at the University of Western Australia.

Maybe the quiet one, Hendrick,

the one sitting still.

Here this guy.

In a gesture of welcoming,

they burn my bee suit.

(speaks in foreign language)

Push him in.

I could have brought in germs from my trip.

(speaking foreign language)

This is where the last healthy bees live.

A continent without the Varroa mite.

(gentle music)

Domesticated Queens are inseminated

with the sperm of feral bees.

To eliminate the risk of what happened in Brazil,

the Australian test bees

are brought to an uninhabited island,

where they'll undergo a stress test.

If they pass the test they'll continue to be bred.

Perhaps even for the world market.

They might, of course, mutate into Frankenstein bees

but, at least they won't do any harm,

it's too far from the mainland.

But maybe the bees on the mainland

become diseased, and only the ones, here,

on the island stay healthy.

In that case I see Noah's Ark.

(gentle music)

Oh!

(gentle music)

(beekeepers laughing)

We seem to be afraid of

foreigners coming into the country,

even though we're all immigrants here.

And so the African bees came,

they didn't have papers

they didn't have permission,

they didn't have visas, or even passports.

And there was really nothing we could do to stop them.

They're completely wild creatures.

They have not been domesticated.

They are as they have always been.

And people were very frightened of that.

And then, when I went to Brazil in 1995,

I found that the country had completely

embraced the African bee.

That what we have been told about the African bees,

that they didn't make honey,

that they were not good pollinators,

they were impossible to manage,

I found that all those things were completely false.

They can survive on very scarce resources.

If I were a gambling person,

I would bet on the survival of the African bees

over, just about, any other species, so,

so, I think they'll be here after we're gone.

(solemn music)

(bees buzzing)

The bees that I took out from the roof

did not like their new nest and so they left.

They swarmed.

They will find a limb on a tree

or something like that where they can cluster

to take care of the queen.

From that cluster the bees will send out scout bees

to look for a suitable nest site.

(bees buzzing)

If a scout bee finds a suitable nest site,

she will come back to this cluster of bees

and she will tell her nest mates

about the very good site.

(bees buzzing)

And then, when they reach a consensus

then they will all leave together.

(solemn music)

(bees buzzing)

Not even a bear could get to those bees!

(solemn music)

(bees buzzing)

(solemn music)

(solemn music)