Documentary filmmaker Rajani Mani gives bees their due

Every winter, a few high-rise apartments in Bengaluru get a busy set of houseguests. Apis dorsata, commonly called rockbees or giant Asian honeybees, arrive, unannounced, in the tens of thousands, and set up their hives on the overhangs of balconies. If humans let them, they stay on for three to four months before vacating the premises as suddenly as they arrived.

Where do they come from? Where do they go? No one really knows.

Should we care? Most certainly, says filmmaker Rajani Mani whose documentary, Colonies in Conflict, explores how this widely found species of honeybee has adapted to urban landscapes. It also explores their role as pollinators and how they are navigating a changing world.

The 74-minute film, which premiered at the Bangalore International Centre on 22 May, World Biodiversity Day, features scientists and researchers studying pollinators. Over two years, Mani shot in Bengaluru and at the coffee plantations and forests in Coorg, where the bees are commonly found.

“I made this film to create interest in our underrepresented insect species, particularly honeybees,” says Mani. “We accept honeybees because we associate them with honey. But they have a bigger role as pollinators, which is directly linked to our regional economies and food security across Asia, yet we know so little about them.”

Mani set out to find out more about the bees in 2018. People were using pest control or insect killer sprays to kill them. She started looking for information about the insects, to show her neighbours. There wasn’t much. So Mani decided to make a film from the perspective of the species.

“Most films are from the view of the honey hunters, who harvest honey from rockbees colony. Nobody has considered the point of view of the bees,” says Mani.

The film’s human protagonist is her neighbour, Pranitha Penmetsa, who has a keen fondness for the bees. They’ve been arriving at her balcony like clockwork for the last five years and she’s now found a routine to accommodate them. As the winter sun sets, she closes all her windows and draws dark curtains to prevent the bees from being attracted to the light. That balcony is also out of bounds while the bees visit.

But not everyone is so accommodating, doing lasting damage. “Using an insect killer spray and pest control kills off the entire hive, including the queen,” says Mani.

More humane ways take time, money, and skill. Mani suggests gently smoking them out with herbal incense for two or three weeks, so the colony leaves at once.

The other way is to hire a beehive relocator. In the film, Mani follows Venkat, a Tamil-speaking local who wears army fatigues and uses mountain climbing equipment to lower himself from the tops of the tallest buildings to a position right next to the hive. Then, depending on its size and location of the hive, he either clears the hive with his gloved hands, or he collects the entire hive in a big bag, releasing the bees in a safer location. “All of this has to be done in half an hour, otherwise the colony will die,” says Mani. “Venkat is often delayed negotiating payment or getting stuck in traffic.”

Why bother to go to such lengths to protect entire colonies? “Honeybees are important as pollinators, they will feed on almost any flower. A colony has anything from 20 to 40,000. They forage more, feed more and hence pollinate more, whether it’s cultivated crop or forests,” says Mani.

Indian honeybees have been less researched than their Western cousins. Pollination management is relatively new. The Indian species is open-nesting. They don’t take well to beekeeping enclosures. They’re migratory, but no one really knows where they go, how far or why. They’re also crepuscular, they forage at twilight and full moon nights, not in the daytime.

“The question is, how does the Apis dorsata navigate during the night, when the sun is not present? Do they switch their compass reference system?” asks Axel Brockmann, associate professor at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS). He runs the Honeybee Lab, which researches Asian honeybees native to India. Brockmann was scientific advisor and co-producer for the film. “The ability to fly during day and night is unique. So, we expect to find mechanisms that one cannot study with other insects.”

The finding is the tough part. It means tracking a whole swarm. But the faster we find a way to do it, the better off we’ll all be. “Forests are not magically regenerated,” says Renee M Borges, evolutionary ecologist at the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru, in the film. “They are regenerated through seed. Seed is the product of the pollination.”

Private and public screening of Colonies in Conflict can be booked atwww.coloniesinconflict.com