Bee Movie

So, I normally leave the world of animated films alone, as they are typically completely inaccurate. So we have to first squash some general animation mistakes before getting into the nitty gritty of it: Bees have 6 legs (not 4), and they do not have the typical mammal face. Instead, they have 2 compound eyes, no nose and no teeth. So now that we have that out of the way, let’s venture into Bee Movie!

1. The first glaring mistake happens right off the bat as the DreamWorks boy floats up with his bundle of balloons and gets stung by a bee. The main problem with this is the fact that the stinger is an integral part of the bees’ anatomy. When the stinger detaches in honeybees, it takes with it the entire back portion of the bee's abdomen, along with a nerve ganglion (brain), various muscles, a venom sac, and the end of the bee’s digestive tract, basically gutting it. The venom sac continues to pulse, continuing to pump venom into its victim. Had our bee friend actually stung the boy, it would have been dead on the ground with a gaping hole where the stinger once was, not resting leisurely on the DreamWorks moon.

2. As our star bee Barry Benson, gets ready for graduation, he sharpens his stinger for his big day. Problem here is that boy bees do not have stingers. Stingers in ants, bees, and wasps (Order: Hymenoptera) are modified ovipositors or egg layers. In social Hymenoptera, there is typically one “queen” that lays all the eggs, so the rest of the bees have evolved modified ovipositors to help protect the hive in case of attack. The queen has a true ovipositor and therefore does not have any means to protect herself or her hive. But since Mr. Seinfeld was one of the writers on the film, and assuming he wanted to be the star, we can let this very large error slide, as it would probably be less convincing to have him play a female character.

3. It is also apparent that this is not a normal beehive as there are way too many male bees present in the hive. Males, also known as drones, are a very small percentage of the hive. The males have one purpose, to fertilize the queen. They do not work, they do not take care of the young, they do not make honey and they do not protect the queen (since they don’t have stingers).

4. As Alan and Barry enter the workplace they are told that they will stay in the job they pick for the rest of their life. Although it is true that bees have the same job their whole life, they do not have the luxury of picking what that job is. It is a true caste system that they are born into. The queen, for example, starts as an egg, laid as any other egg, but is fed a certain substance (royal jelly) by the nurse bees once the egg hatches. Royal jelly is fed to the larvae (baby bee) only when the ”queen” position is vacant or the reigning queen is sick or old. When more workers are needed to maintain and protect the hive, or drones are needed to fertilize the queen, that is what is produced.

5. And then there are the pollen jocks. These steroid-injected characters hold their pollen in some fancy contraption strapped to their backs. In actuality, these carriers would be female, since we’ve learned the females do all the work in the hive, including the acquisition of pollen, and they would store their pollen in pollen baskets located on their hind legs.

6. Barry mentions to Vanessa that the queen of his hive was elected on the campaign slogan “My only interest is flowers” but as we know queens are born, not elected.

7. Again we encounter sex determination issues when we are introduced to Mooseblood, a friendly mosquito that Barry meets on a truck windshield. Mooseblood talks wildly about acquiring his next blood meal. But unfortunately male mosquitoes do not feed on blood. Most of them feed on nectar or pollen. Female mosquitoes are the only mosquitoes that feed on blood and that usually occurs when they are producing eggs, blood being a protein requirement for the flies to properly nourish their young.

8. The accuracy of the apiary (bee farm) is quite good. Bee boxes are set up in fairly close proximity and on a fairly regular basis men (or women) in bee suits and veils remove the combs and extract the honey. To do this without agitating the hive, a smoker is used to relax the hive. The smokers do not contain nicotine or tar, but rather paper and/or wood chips which can often be quite nice smelling (at least to this human).

9. Once the trial against the humans begins, Adam becomes enraged and stings the lawyer in the courtroom.

a. First, bees don’t sting because they are angry; they sting for one reason - to protect the hive and more importantly their queen. Since the lawyer was not posing a threat to either home or queen, Adam had no reason to sting.
b. Second, he should be dead, since, as we know, the stinger is part of the animal, and when the Adam’s stinger is released, the entire venom sac is ripped from his body along with most of his innards.
c. And of course, Adam is a boy, and boy bees don’t have stingers.

10. Barry declares that bees have been around for 27 million years. While I'm sure the writers were attempting to point out that bees have been around for a really long time, they really could have driven the point home by referencing a figure a little closer to the truth. Fossils have been found dating bees to the early Cretaceous, approximately 100 million years ago. And more specifically, honeybees have been around at least 35 million years.

11. When the bees get all their honey back and quit their day jobs, the picture that is painted is fairly accurate (though it wouldn’t be quite so desolate as many plants are not dependent on insect pollination). If all bees were to go away (or stop the inadvertent pollination of plants) we would lose a vast majority of the following plants, all of which are at least partly dependent on bees:

Allspice, almond, apple, apricot, avocado, blackberry, blueberry, brazil nuts, broccoli, brussell sprouts, buckwheat, cabbage, cardamom, cashews, canola, cantaloupe, cauliflower, celery, clover, coconut, coffee, coriander, cotton, cranberry, cucumber, fennel, guava, kidney bean, kiwifruit, lima bean, loquat, lychee, macadamia, mango, mustard, nectarine okra, onion, pawpaw, peach, pear, persimmon, pomegranate pumpkin, raspberry, sesame, soybean, squash, star fruit, strawberry, string bean, sunflower, walnut, watermelon, and zucchini.

As a note to the above, when the bees returned, they would not transform the landscape quite so quickly. It would take many months for the pollination to take effect and produce seeds, which in turn would grow into new plants.

Grade: B (really, what did you expect?)