A Review of Sweet Things at the Revue

photo by gak, rights reserved

The Revue Cinema has been in its west-end Toronto community for 100 years now. Today Bee Biologist Brock (known as BBB to friends) Harpur and I attended the Epicure's Revue, a monthly event featuring a film on food plus tastings provided by a number of local chefs and eateries.

Today's feature film was Colony, a documentary by Carter Gunn and Ross McDonnell about American beekeepers and their trials with colony collapse disorder. This is the mysterious problem which has caused honeybee colonies to simply pull up stakes and fly away into the sunset, to their beekeepers' distress.

The film does a good job of introducing some interesting characters in the beekeeping community and showing how the colony collapse combined with the 2008 economic collapse has been ruining their businesses. However, it takes a limited point of view heavily influenced by these large commercial "pollinators", as beekeepers whose main business is renting out their bees for crop pollination call themselves. The idea that being on a flatbed truck several months of the year, fed sugar water, and moved from Florida to California to Maine to Florida might be stressing the bees never came up. Beautiful visual filmwork and lots of human interest, but a partial failure through not exposing us to more sides of the problem.


No such caveats apply to the tastings before the show! BBB, who has a sensitive palate, thought highly of them while I positively wallowed in the lavender and honey ice cream from the Chocolateria and the chevre balls coated with nuts and honey from Lardon, just next to the cinema. For chocolate lovers, I should note that the Chocolateria has run some other wonderful events at the Revue.


Fred Davis, who keeps bees in several Toronto locations including atop the Canadian Opera Company's building, provided tastings of COC summer and fall honey, as well as Casa Loma honey and comb. He described beekeeping in Toronto at landmark sites and showed beekeepers gear. You can here more from Fred here.

Maria Kasstan and Seeds of Diversity. Courtesy of Toronto Beekeepers Coop

Fred is just one of over 60 members of the Toronto Beekeepers Co-op. There were other members at the Revue, including musician Maria Kasstan who was staffing a Seeds of Diversity booth, just as in the picture from last year. There's a great interview with Maria here. Maria is a member of the Raging Grannies, and I believe may have provided a song or two about pollinators at a recent event (but, I can't find a link. Help!).

All in all, a very sweet event!