Perhaps the most shocking scene in More than Honey doesn’t feature a single bee. Director Markus Imhoof follows a group of labourers in northern China as they painstakingly pollinate all the flowers in a field by hand.

They have to do this because there are no bees left to do the job. This harsh reality is the result of a series of bad decisions that began in the late 1950s with, then leader of China, Mao Zedong’s war on grain-eating sparrows. Exterminating the birds led to an uncontrolled surge in crop-destroying insects. Mao had the insects killed as well. Unfortunately, the pesticides that took out the locusts also took out the bees.

Despite a swarm of workers in facemasks meticulously daubing pollen onto individual flowers, the surrounding landscape is dusty and arid. Bees pollinate 80 per cent of flowering plants, and we do not have enough time or workers in the world to keep an entire ecosystem pollinated the way bees can. Specific crops may survive, as in China, but diversity dies.

Imhoof’s stark shots suggest this dystopian scene is the future for the rest of the world if we continue to ignore colony collapse disorder. This increasingly common phenomenon has been reported since 2006 and consists of mysterious accounts of bees vanishing from their hives without a trace.

So far, the residents of 1.5 million out of 2.4 million beehives have been lost in the US, along with 25 per cent of German bee colonies. Similar reports are coming from countries including the UK, France, Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Italy. And although there has been no shortage of hand-wringing about it in the media, few policy changes have sought to curb this problem because it has been hard to pinpoint the cause.

Gross bee-trayal

But after you finish the film, you will no longer find colony collapse disorder mysterious. Imhoof describes the secret life of bees in a series of heartbreaking scenes that verge, at times, on the unwatchable: bees pollinating almond trees are blasted with neurotoxic fungicides; bees cooped up in trucks for cross-country trips choke on their own waste while Varroa mites feast on their blood and disfigure their wings; bees robbed of their nutritious honey subsisting on a thin gruel of industrial-grade antibiotics and sugar water.

Imhoof reveals a world in which bees are manipulated and confused by breeding practices that long ago stopped seeing – or treating – them as anything more than disposable machines.

The stunning cinematography is thanks to the ingenious contraptions Imhoof rigged up to enable him to film live inside hives and follow bees on their flights. The beauty of the images makes these scenes harder to watch, but the film is so compelling that you persevere.

It is worth hanging in there for the – spoiler alert! – unexpected silver lining, which has you rooting for unlikely heroes, African killer bees, and for the toothy, cactus-pollinating cowboy beekeeper who cheerfully allows himself to get stung by these wild creatures.

The film manages to coax a complex narrative into a surprising, and almost optimistic, ending. And it does this without pulling any punches about the complicity of our voracious appetites – for honey, almonds, and other fruits of pollination – in colony collapse disorder and without compromising either accuracy or honesty. You can safely recommend it to your friends without sending their evening to a miserable end.

This is the best favour Imhoof could have done for the bees. Unlike so many documentaries about pressing topics, his film doesn’t send you into depression, and that might make the film go viral. Global understanding is the best hope for real change.