Queen’s bees

AS the title suggests, The Secret Life Of Bees required plenty of stinging insects to join the movie’s stars like Queen Latifah, Alicia Keys and Sophie Okonedo.

So it was a good thing that Latifah is a huge fan of bees, something that came in handy while playing August Boatwright, matriarch of a beekeeping family in the 1960s US civil rights era.

“I love bees,” she explains.

“The fact that they work all day long to feed the queen and the babies and make honey and pollen is just a fascinating life.”

Her character does most of the harvesting for her family’s business. She calls Julian Wooten “the bee whisperer” as this retired strawberry farmer has 50 years experience with the insects. His job was to instruct the cast on handling these insects.

After a lesson on bee biology, he showed them how to extract honey from the combs, how to separate honey from bits of wax and on general bee etiquette. “I was stressing slow, gentle movements and trying to get them over their fear,” he says, well aware about the actors’ anxiety at being stung.

Latifah for one was both impressed by his knowledge and reassured by his guidance.

“Going in there, I was always trying to calm down and come to the bees with love,” she explains.

All the same, handling the honeycombs covered with live bees while using her bare hands was nerve-wracking. “I just kept my hands closed because naturally you want to swat at them, but you can’t. So you remember that they don’t want to harm you. They actually lose their life to sting you.”

One problem for the filmmakers was that bees are summer-orientated insects, but the film was being shot in the middle of winter. Prop master John Sanders arranged for 12 beehives to be imported from Florida, some with as many as 40,000-60,000 bees in them.

Even director Gina Prince- Bythewood overcame her fear of bees. “I’m much better now. I used to be the one running around screaming if one bee was in the room. Now I can enter a room with 12 live hives and I’m fine – which is shocking,” she says.

The story, based on the bestselling novel by Sue Monk Kidd, tells how the arrival of a teenage girl (played by Dakota Fanning) in the Boatwright household changes their lives.

For co-stars Alicia Keys, better known for singing rather than acting, and British actress Sophie Okonedo, their roles as Boatwright sisters called for them to learn new skills.

Grammy Award-winning recording artist Keys had to learn to play the cello as her character is a music teacher.

Okonedo attended cooking school to prepare for playing sister May. She made it known to the film-makers from the start that she wasn’t much of a cook. As many of her scenes take place in the kitchen, she was given cooking lessons by restaurant owners from a popular Southern soul food spot, Two Fat Ladies (not, of course, to be confused with our very own TFLs).

Before the cameras started rolling, the film’s female leads travelled to New York to get to know one another in advance of going on the set. Sue Monk Kidd’s internationally acclaimed book came out of her experience growing up as an adolescent in the South during the 1960s. It took her almost 30 years to write it down. Bees were part of her childhood – they inhabited a wall in the guest house in the large country house in Sylvester, Georgia, where she grew up.

“I remember my mother cleaning up puddles of honey that had seeped out, and the unearthly sound of bee hum vibrating through the house,”

she says. The bees never left.

When her husband visited her childhood home, he woke to find the bees flying around his room.

That was when his wife “began imagining a young girl lying in bed while bees poured through cracks in her bedroom walls”. Thinking about that image led to the creation of Lily Melissa Owens, the girl who became central to the story.

That The Secret Lives Of Bees was filmed at all is down to award-winning producer Lauren Shuler Donner, who brought the X-Men franchise, You’ve Got Mail and the Free Willy films to the big screen.

She read the book in galley form eight years ago and couldn’t put it down.

Published in 2002, the novel has been published in more than 23 languages and spent more than two years on The New York Times best-seller list, selling more than 4.5m copies.

■ The Secret Life Of Bees (12A) opens in cinemas tomorrow