Angelina Jolie Shows Us the Art of Beekeeping

Ah, hello.

[bright music]

[speaking foreign language]

As I started to work with Guerlain,

we spoke often about the bees

and the commitment that Guerlain already had

to the bees.

And then we really started to talk about what,

what could we do to improve the situation?

What could we do both

for the bees and also for,

for women and what would that look like?

This is the center and in many ways,

and there's so much research

and training being done from here.

I thought I knew something about bees

and beekeeping and training,

and I thought I understood the importance.

But really,

when you really dig into it

and you really start to learn about what,

for example,

we would lose,

30% of the honey bees disappearing.

You know,

and had we not had the beekeepers

and the work of places like OFA,

we would lose them.

What happens when we lose them?

What happens when we lose them all?

I wasn't a young environmentalist, right?

I'm more a humanist.

I've been very active in displacement in the,

the politics of,

you know fighting against persecution.

But it always leads back to environment.

Even displaced people are often displaced

because of the damage to the environment.

[upbeat music]

My name's,

I come from Greece

and we're here in the center of Provence

in France learning all about bees.

Bees are the most important animal on earth.

Through their pollinating services,

they offer one out of three bites

of food that we eat every day.

Without bees,

we wouldn't have the fruits

and the vegetables that we like to eat.

We wouldn't have the clothes that we like to wear.

The world would be completely different without the bees.

Populations of the bees are declining all around the world.

Different factors that play

a role in this,

habitat loss,

monoculture, pesticides, parasites.

So it's a complicated environment for them right now.

Oh yeah.

[Woman] I have one here on the top.

You see they're pretty happy.

Thank you.

[Woman] There's a lot of bees in this one.

Oh yeah. This is a,

quite a healthy hive

because we can see the different colors of the pollen.

Which means that there's a lot of different sources

of flowers around in the area.

So they're collectsing it

and you can see there's different colors.

There's white,

there's yellow,

there's orange.

This is basically used to feed the baby bees.

And this is why it's close to,

to the babies.

So even in the winter,

they have to maintain

the same temperature for the babies to be born healthy

and for the queen to remain healthy.

So this is a struggle,

and this is one of the reasons

that they connect altogether

in a ball.

And they are around the babies the larva,

and they stayed together there

to warm it up because in

the winter it's much colder outside.

So they keep it.

They keep themselves cold in,

in a ball,

in like a hug.

They've been here a month.

They taught me something today.

I didn't bring knowledge to them.

Thinking about the cycles

of life,

thinking about what needs to be done,

participating in ways to make improvements,

being together.

And to sit with them and they speak often of virtue

and humility and life,

feeling just in touch with yourself,

making something,

creating something,

connecting to something

and feeling that you're contributing

and being a part of something

in life that grounds you even

just within your own home.

You could, there,

there are ways that individuals could keep some bees

or at least have some flowers

or dedicate some part of their life

or time to the awareness and the,

and the encouragement of these kind of programs.

Today, here,

I felt,

you felt a family.

I would like to think that programs like

this will be happening all over the world.

So maybe this is the bees.

Maybe there's the tree planting.

I hope there are many,

and I hope they overlap.

And I hope it's just the new way we live.

[upbeat music]