My Garden of a Thousand Bees Music

For months while on lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic, acclaimed wildlife filmmaker Martin Dohrn filmed the bees in his urban backyard in Bristol, England. He closely followed individual bees and discovered sixty bee species lived right exterior his dorsum door. Dohrn gained their trust and documented their behaviors, all with specialized lenses he crafted himself.

What began every bit a project in his spare time became a total-length film,
My Garden of a Thousand Bees, which premiered on PBS in Oct 2021. And on June 24 at 6 p.m., the film will exist brought to the National Mall for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival equally office of the Earth Optimism × Folklife program.

My Garden of a Thousand Bees
is a production of Passion Planet, The WNET Group, and HHMI Tangled Banking concern Studios in association with Ammonite Films. The film is presented with back up from HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, which has congenital a nationwide impact entrada effectually the film with PBS Nature, focused on educating audiences about the importance of pollinators and how they tin can aid them.

“At that place was an opportunity here to actually alter the fashion people think well-nigh bees and to assist them understand there’south a lot more than to bees than honey,” said Jared Lipworth, an executive producer and head of outreach and bear on at HHMI Tangled Bank Studios. “This moving picture focuses primarily on native bees, which are important pollinators and quite different from honeybees.”

HHMI Tangled Bank Studios is a mission-driven production company that produces powerful films virtually science and scientists. Many of their documentaries invite audiences to learn well-nigh how science can help protect and restore the natural earth. When Dohrn’s film came to the studio during the coronavirus pandemic, producers immediately saw a connection between the motion picture’s content and the studio’southward goals.

“We’re looking for content and programs that inspire people to care about the planet, to empathise the importance of science in protecting the planet,” Lipworth said. “Equally a mission-focused studio, nosotros non but support a film’due south product, but also ensure its message is widespread by edifice an educational outreach campaign. For Dohrn’s moving picture, the studio wanted to focus on encouraging people to engage with their local ecosystems and support pollinators.”

HHMI Tangled Bank Studios and PBS Nature launched the #PlantWildflowers campaign around
My Garden of a Thousand Bees
to encourage people to learn about – and protect – pollinators, from bees and butterflies to wasps and beetles . With leading educational, conservation and media organizations, including Globe Wildlife Fund’s Wild Classroom and PBS Learning, HHMI Tangled Bank Studios created and distributed a suite of free educational materials , tools and videos. In celebration of the film, HHMI Tangled Depository financial institution Studios and Nature joined Earth Wildlife Fund’s “Ane Foursquare Pes” initiative to encourage people beyond the U.Southward. to learn virtually pollinators and institute one square foot of native wildflowers to support them.

HHMI Tangled Bank Studios partnered with an organization calledSTAR Net, which works to bring Stalk content to local libraries, to provide libraries with the opportunity to utilize for grants to screen the moving picture for their audiences, share pollinator-focused pedagogy materials, and host pollinator-related events. These events range from planting wildflower seeds to using community scientific discipline apps like iNaturalist and Seek to partake in a “BioBlitz”, which allows users to collect information on their local plant and wildlife and contribute to scientific databases.

“We accept close to 300 libraries participating, we take five big PBS stations, and nosotros too have somewhere in the range of nearly thirty different national organizations that are involved in bee conservation and pollinator enquiry,” Lipworth said. “In all, by the cease of Baronial, I call up nosotros will cease up with around 600 events around the country.”

This month,
My Garden of a Thousand Bees
and the #PlantWildflowers entrada will come to the National Mall with Earth Optimism.

For HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, the partnership with Earth Optimism, which began before the Folklife Festival, was a no-brainer. “We have a similar mission: we are looking to share positive stories well-nigh conservation,” Lipworth said.

The studio partnered with the Earth Optimism Summit a couple of years ago and engages regularly with the Globe Optimism team throughout the year on global conservation bug. The Smithsonian’s Globe Optimism try seeks to “change the conservation narrative” around climate activism to one of positive solutions and touch, and the World Optimism × Folklife program at the Festival will highlight the more hopeful shift, rather than the usual doom and gloom approach.

“Our approach as a studio is to look for the positive stories to share,” Lipworth said of the connection between the studio and Earth Optimism. “We immediately recognized that there were a lot of synergies between what nosotros were trying to practice and what they were trying to do.”

At the Folklife Festival,
My Garden of a Thousand Bees
volition screen outdoors at the Ralph Rinzler Main Phase as the central event in HHMI Tangled Bank Studios’ programming with Earth Optimism × Folklife. According to Lipworth, the motion picture lends itself to an outdoor viewing with small bees projected on a large screen. “Information technology’s been a dream since the get-go to practise an outdoor screening of this film,” he said.

The studio’due south hope for filmgoers? “Information technology’s pretty elementary,” Lipworth said. “See bees like y’all’ve never seen them before.”

And through Dohrn’s lenses, viewers will get only that: an up-close and personal introduction to the complexities and beauty of bees. The audience will follow the bees’ secret lives and go intimately familiar with them just every bit Dohrn did, meeting pollinators like Nicky, the woodcarving leafcutter bee. With the help of accompanying programming and the #PlantWildflowers campaign, the film will educate Festival viewers on the power and importance of pollinators.

“It’south an eye-opening look at the amazing world of bees, which we hope volition spark interest in seeing them in a unlike fashion and doing what you can to protect them,” Lipworth said.

My Garden of a G Bees
will screen outdoors on Friday, June 24, at vi p.m. at the Rinzler Stage on the National Mall. The consequence is costless and open to the public. Popcorn, drinks, and special #PlantWildflowers items volition be given out for gratuitous to the first 100 guests. Assisted listening devices and captioning will be provided.

Visitors tin can learn more about bees and other pollinators at the Festival past visiting the People-Powered Scientific discipline tent and the Festival’s Pollinator Garden full of native wildflowers. and educational stations including the “Be Kind to Bees” session at 11 a.m. on June 24 and July 2.

Visitors tin learn more about bees and other pollinators at the Earth Optimism × Folklife program past interacting with the pollinator garden full of native wildflowers and by participating in family activities like “Be Kind to Bees” (June 24 at 11 a.g. and July two at noon) and “Bee Discovery and Cartoon” led by artists from Peppermint Narwhal (June 24 at 1 p.chiliad.) in the People-Powered Science tent.

Annabella Hoge is an intern with the 2022 Folklife Festival’s media team. She is a ascension senior at Georgetown University studying American studies, anthropology, and journalism and hails from Los Angeles, California. Her favorite wildflower is the California poppy.