Not surprisingly for mid December, our numbers were lower than previous film nights, but the 20 or so audience found “More than Honey” worth the effort of venturing out into the cold. The photography was amazing and we all learned a great deal about how to, (or how not to), look after our all- important pollinators. the honey bees. Sadly we also learned how industrialised the process was in California in particular and how insecticides had wiped out bee populations completely in large tracts of China, meaning that hand pollination of fruit crops was essential!
Veroa mites and foulbrood infections have also decimated colonies and led to many bee keepers giving up. The film inspired some of us to look into keeping bees ourselves, and with this is mind, there is a group of us hoping to visit Black Horse Apiaries in St Johns. John Hamer is the owner of this site ad he very kindly attended the film and fielded all the expert questions at the end.
If you would be interested in going, please respond to this blog, or to me at hilarygriffiths@hotmail.com so we can plan for a visit in April next year.
Welcome to Woking Environment Action! 
Cornstalks Everywhere But Nothing Else, Not Even A Bee
“We’ll start in a cornfield — we’ll call it an Iowa cornfield in late summer — on a beautiful day. The corn is high. The air is shimmering. There’s just one thing missing — and it’s a big thing…
…a very big thing, but I won’t tell you what, not yet.
Instead, let’s take a detour. We’ll be back to the cornfield in a minute, but just to make things interesting, I’m going to leap halfway around the world to a public park near Cape Town, South Africa, where you will notice a cube, a metal cube, lying there in the grass.
That cube was put there by David Liittschwager, a portrait photographer, who spent a few years traveling the world, dropping one-cubic-foot metal frames into gardens, streams, parks, forests, oceans, and then photographing whatever, or whoever came through. Beetles, crickets, fish, spiders, worms, birds — anything big enough to be seen by the naked eye he tried to capture and photograph. Here’s what he found after 24 hours in his Cape Town cube:”
see the results and read the rest of this fascinating article at:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/11/29/166156242/cornstalks-everywhere-but-nothing-else-not-even-a-bee