A beekeeper reviews The Beekeeper movie

I am a beekeeper and went to go see The Beekeeper movie.

tl;dr: If you liked John Wick, go see it.

The early showing on opening day

Very much in the style of previous Jason Statham action films, the plot is just a device to take us from one fight scene to another.

The bad guys are flamboyant phone scammers and our hero goes after them with a calm determination. There are gaping plot holes, but no one in the theater will care.

Highlights include actual beekeeping scenes, a secret beekeeper lair, the surprise appearance of an Australian supervillain type, and a few bee puns.

Intertwined with the beekeeping, we have a FBI special agent tracking down our hero, with both a drinking problem of some sort, a hapless partner, and torn loyalties between “the law or justice”.

It’s a mindless popcorn movie, similar in many ways to the John Wick series.

I told my wife, Michele, that there needs to be a crossover between the Beekeeperverse and the Wickiverse and she said “There’s not enough ammo in the universe for that.”

But now onto the important stuff.

How was actual beekeeping portrayed in the movie?

Was it Hollywood nonsense, or was it accurate?

In short, pretty damn accurate.

Our hero, beekeeper Adam Clay, wearing a unique jacket. Side clasps are quite unusual.

Good to see him wearing full PPE, likely some spicy bees he’s dealing with. Appropriate use of smoke as well.

Very accurate use of the j-tool to pull a frame from a honey super box.

Doing a quick inspection. Even tilting into the sunlight for the best look.

He does a textbook shake to get the ladies off a good looking frame of honey. Also uses a brush to clear the stubborn ones off.

He places the honey frames in a bag, which I hadn’t seen done before.

A real uncapping knife used to prep the frames for extraction.

A manually cranked two frame extractor with lots of beekeeping gear on the worktable.

Filling a large jar from the honey bucket, with the bucket on a tilted stand.

Retrieving a Beekeeper comms device hidden in a hive box. Usually we find these covered in a lot of propolis and not so easy to remove.

The typical login screen we Beekeepers see when regularly logging into the secret black ops system for wetwork assignments. Look like maybe one update behind the current software version.

The director did a great job of accurately portraying this part of beekeeping and I give it a thumbs up.

Hopefully in The Beekeeper II, we see our hero treating for varroa mites!