Apr 10
Georgia Southern Museum Statesboro, GA
Morgan Dunn, M.S.
Botanic Garden Education Coordinator, Georgia Southern University
andDr. Paul Cerpovicz
Professor of Chemistry - Emeritus, East Georgia State College; Beekeeper
andDr. Isaac Park
Assistant Professor of Biology, Georgia Southern University
Bee Movie— Real Bees, Real Science
Program Description
A spring full of flowers is only possible with pollinators! Join Georgia Southern's Botanic Garden Educator and bee researcher Morgan Dunn, Beekeeper Dr. Paul Cerpovicz, and Professor of Biology Dr. Isaac Park to learn all about the story of bees. Dr. Cerpovicz will have a live observational hive for guests to see and before we watch the movie, hear the 3 discuss how pollinators in coastal Georgia are being impacted by climate change, how citizen science helps, and the history of honey bees for the perfect springtime movie night!
Presented At
Georgia Southern Museum Statesboro, GA
Film Synopsis
A free-thinking bee sues humanity for stealing his species' honey.
A recent college graduate, bee Barry B. Benson wants more out of life than the inevitable career that awaits him and every other worker in New Hive City—a job at Honex making honey. Barry jumps at the chance to venture out of the hive, and soon encounters a world beyond his wildest dreams. When Barry inadvertently meets a quirky florist named Vanessa, he breaks one of the cardinal rules of beedom—he talks to her. A friendship soon develops, and Barry gets a guided crash course in the ways of the human race. When he shockingly discovers that anyone can purchase honey right off the grocery store shelf, he realizes that his true calling is to stop this injustice and set the world right by suing the human race for stealing the bees' precious honey.
About the Speaker
A Botanic Garden Education Coordinator at Georgia Southern University, Morgan Dunn has been studying bees for more than a decade, beginning with research on the effects of pesticides on honey bees early in her career. She later researched native bees while curating and identifying more than 12,000 bee specimens across two studies. Morgan went on to earn her master’s degree studying the blue orchard bee, a native North American solitary bee, and has authored three publications on the species. She now serves as the Education Coordinator at the Botanic Garden at Georgia Southern University, where she continues sharing her enthusiasm for bees with the community.
Paul Cerpovicz is a Professor of Chemistry – Emeritus from East Georgia State College in Swainsboro, now Georgia Southern’s East Georgia Campus. He began keeping honey bees in 2012 after many years of urging from his wife, Joelle! As a hobbyist beekeeper, he enjoys maintaining anywhere from 6 to 10 hives in Statesboro. He is a member of the Georgia Beekeepers Association, the Coastal Empire Beekeepers Association and the Ogeechee Area Beekeepers Association. In 2015, Paul set up beehives on East Georgia’s Swainsboro campus, and in the following year established the college as the fourteenth Bee Campus USA Affiliate in the country and began a campus beekeeping club open to students, staff, and faculty. Besides teaching, he enjoyed being involved in many educational outreach activities through the college visiting local schools and festivals, and setting up events such as the annual honey extraction parties held on the East Georgia campus, where people from the community and campus help to extract honey from the campus beehives. After retirement in 2024, he began serving as the president of Statesboro’s Ogeechee Area Beekeeping Association, and continues to volunteer with other club members in many local and regional outreach events and visit schools to promote beekeeping and pollinator education to people of all ages.
Dr. Isaac Park is a landscape ecologist and plant biologist in the Department of Biology at Georgia Southern University who studies plant-pollinator interactions and the impacts of changing climate on the timing of plant flowering or bee flights. Current projects in his lab include assessing the effects of recent climate changes on the availability of flowers to bees throughout coastal Georgia, examining pollen collection by bees in wetland ecosystems across Georgia, and Bloomwatch Tybee, a participatory science collaboration with the city of Tybee and the Tybee maritime Academy to monitor the timing of bee flights and plant flowering.