The Fresno Bee

Dennis Pollack reviewed Pollen Nation for the Business section of the Fresno Bee, just before the screening in the Fresno Filmworks Festival.

Here's an excerpt:

Pollen Nation" offers no answers to the health plight of the bees and beekeepers' battles with colony-collapse disorder. Nor is it a heavy-handed environmentalist polemic.

But it does raise the question of what happens when the ways of agriculture -- growing almonds on huge plots of land as a "monoculture" with no other pollinators and little other foliage around -- clash with nature's needs for honeybees and the bees' need for year-round forage.

"God didn't make bees to run all over the country like this," said beekeeper David Hackenberg, who runs bees up and down the East Coast from Florida to Maine, and also occasionally out to California's almonds.

His remarks pinpointed the artificial way nature is controlled and the stresses it can place on the bees.