Angelina Jolie tries beekeeping in new video highlighting importance of insects
Humanitarian says ‘it always leads back to environment’
Angelina Jolie is using her platform to raise awareness of the dwindling bee population, with the humanitarian highlighting the importance of beekeeping.
The 46-year-old actor spoke candidly about efforts to save the insects and train a new generation of beekeepers, and donned a beekeeping suit, in a new video with Vogue.
The video was filmed in Provence, France, where the Guerlain ambassador met with members of the first graduating class of the brand’s Women for Bees initiative at l’Observatoire Français d’Apidologie (OFA).
The program, launched by the French beauty brand in June in collaboration with OFA and UNESCO, aims to train 50 women beekeepers from different biospheres over five years, according to Vogue, with the goal to repopulate 125m bees by 2025.
In the video, Jolie can be seen helping the beekeepers while dressed in a white protective suit and protective head covering, with the Maleficent star explaining that, when she began working with Guerlain, they “spoke often about the bees”.
“I thought I knew something about bees and beekeeping and training, and I thought I understood the importance,” Jolie said. “But really, when you really dig into it and you really start to learn about what, for example, what we would lose, 30 per cent of the honey bees disappearing. 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?”
The Oscar-winner then noted that she wasn’t a “young environmentalist”, but has since come to recognise the importance of saving the insects.
“I wasn’t a young environmentalist, right? I’m more of a humanist. I’ve been very active in displacement in the politics of, you know fighting against persecution,” she noted. “But it always leads back to environment. Even displaced people are often displaced because of the damage to the environment.”
The video then goes on to feature a beekeeper who participated in the program, who explained all the ways “bees are the most important animal on earth”, with the woman noting that through their “pollinating services, they offer one out of three bites of food that we eat every day” and that we wouldn’t have the clothes that we wear without bees.
“The world would be completely different without bees,” she continued, before explaining that the bee population is declining for a number of reasons, such as pesticides, habitat loss, monoculture and parasites.
Elsewhere in the video, Jolie said she hopes that more people become involved in efforts to save the bees, whether through beekeeping, having flowers or simply by dedicating “some part of their life or time to the awareness and the encouragement of these kinds of programs”.
On social media, Jolie’s public support for the bees has prompted praise among her fans and followers, with one person tweeting: “The environment, women, and bees and Angelina Jolie advocating for them is the most beautiful thing I’ve discovered this week.”
Another person wrote on Vogue’s Instagram: “This is awesome!!! She is such a wonderful advocate for so many important issues and insanely beautiful too.”
This is not the first time that Jolie has been outspoken about the importance of saving bees, as she previously posed for a portrait for National Geographic covered in bees for World Bee Day.
Jolie’s support for the initiative comes after she recently joined Instagram to shed light on the humanitarian issue happening in Afghanistan, with the actor, who works as a special envoy to the United Nations refugee agency, sharing a letter she received from an Afghan teenager frightened of the Taliban.
Her arrival on the platform also became notable in its own right, as shortly after Jolie became the fastest user to reach one million Instagram followers.
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