Dave and Davey

I spent a day filming some interviews with Dave and Davey Hackenberg at their shop and home in Pennsylvania last December. It was a preliminary video shoot with them for “The Pollinators”. They are a great father/son team and have a delightful banter as they talk about their roles in the business. Dave is a legend in the beekeeping world and I have heard him referred to as the father of Colony Collapse Disorder, not because he invented it of course, but because he was the guy that sounded the alarm about CCD back in 2005 when he discovered massive disappearances of their bees. Dave is a plain spoken pragmatic guy with a dry sense of humor and he lives bees.

Davey is doing much of the day to day operation of the business and moves bees around all over the place loading and unloading at night and working to keep the bees healthy during the day.
I wanted to do interviews with them in advance of the main filming and also rushed to get their thoughts going into the winter when their bees are down south. The latest challenge for bees is the fear of the Zika virus. Spraying for that has adversely affected bees and some say excessive and careless spraying has already killed millions of bees down in the southern US. Another challenge facing beekeepers.

I have tremendous respect and admiration for what the Hackenbergs do and how hard they work. I look forward to spending a lot of time over this year with these guys.