This gasp-inducing documentary shows a man buzzing over the remarkable insects that bumble around his garden … and ended up changing his life.
Martin Dohrn likes bees. Big bees, small bees, angry bees, randy bees, bees with voluminous ruffs and calves like tiny Henry VIIIs – rare is the bee that Dohrn doesn’t deem worthy of appreciation or something more profound. “It’s hard to explain,” says the veteran wildlife photographer, “but I really feel for bees. They’re really … I mean, I could say they’re my friends.”
If My Garden of a Thousand Bees has a theme (other than “bees”), it’s that companionship can thrive in the least likely places. The least likely place being a small patch of urban Bristol, where the spring and summer of 2020 found Dohrn directing his expertly modified bumble-cams at the 60+ species of bee that frequented his back garden. We meet the wool carder bee, with its bald back and ferocious aerial combat skills; the ashy mining bee, with its exhausted waddle; and the red-tailed mason bee, which builds its nest in an empty snail shell.
Bees live in “a completely different dimension”, he says. Et voilà, a “time-stretching” approach to film-making that results in gasp-inducing detail and a soundtrack pitched somewhere between a bustling heliport and a distant conversation between drunken lawnmowers. There is something pleasantly bee-like about Dohrn’s award-winning film, too. A leisurely thing, it drifts woozily around the photographer’s garden, picking up facts here and there and storing them like pollen.
Enter an industrious leafcutter bee called Nicky. Dohrn is smitten. They bond. “I could tell she was looking at me. Does she know these are my eyes?” he asks. “Scientists have shown that honeybees can recognise individual people, so why wouldn’t she?” Oh, the unbearable lightness of bee-ing! While we ponder the imponderables, the film-maker shows us around Bee City, the remarkable “multicultural” metropolis he has assembled out of wildflowers and bits of wood.
Here, essentially, is life in microcosm; the subtext, as with all modern wildlife documentaries, being, “Let’s not cock it up entirely, eh?” Anyway, here comes Nicky again. Poor Nicky. After building four nests in quick succession, the knackered single mum throws in the towel and, in the dying days of summer, simply flies off into the heavens. “I had no idea I was going to get so involved,” says Dohrn, peering disconsolately into the deserted apartment. His lockdown project has, he says, “changed my view of bees”. A wistful smile. “It’s changed my view of the world.”
