- 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 collecting 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]