A honeybee named Barry B. Benson graduates from college and, upon discovering that human beings sell and consume honey, decides to sue the human race. This premise, the product of Jerry Seinfeld's imagination and approximately seven years of development, is one of the stranger choices in animated film history.

Bee Movie achieves the remarkable distinction of being both a beloved cult classic and a biologically incoherent document. The bees speak English, drive vehicles, attend sporting events, and maintain a complex legal system. Barry develops a romantic interest in a human florist, which the film handles with considerably less critical self-examination than it perhaps should.

The film's second life as an internet meme — in which the full movie is compressed into progressively shorter durations, or the word "bee" is replaced in the script with every occurrence of the word "bee" — has arguably made it more culturally significant than its original theatrical run suggested. It has been viewed billions of times in meme format.

From a scientific perspective: worker bees do not have this much free time.

A Florida beekeeper, taciturn and self-contained, is drawn into a family crisis while managing his tupelo honey operation. Peter Fonda received an Academy Award nomination for his portrayal — one of the most naturalistic performances in a film about beekeeping, which is a narrower field than it sounds but still worth noting.

Ulee's Gold is significant for portraying beekeeping as actual work: methodical, seasonal, physically demanding, and conducted largely in silence. The beekeeping sequences were filmed with real bees and convey the meditative quality that real beekeepers describe. The film's pace matches its subject matter — it moves at the speed of honey.

The tupelo honey referenced in the title is a genuine and prized varietal, produced in the Florida panhandle and distinctive for its high fructose content, which prevents granulation. It is among the most expensive honeys commercially available in the United States.

The original 1973 British folk horror film features bees as a recurring motif on the pagan island of Summerisle, where a community maintains a bee-centered agricultural and spiritual practice. The beekeeping sequences are disturbing in the specific way that folk horror requires: unhurried, communal, and presaging something the protagonist cannot yet understand.

The 2006 American remake with Nicolas Cage features a scene in which Cage's character is tortured with bees — specifically, a cage of bees lowered onto his head while he shouts the film's most memorable line, which has since become an internet phenomenon. This scene bears no resemblance to any real beekeeping practice. It is, however, unforgettable.

The original 1973 film is genuinely good. The 2006 remake is genuinely something else.

A coming-of-age drama in which a young boy with a bee allergy dies from anaphylaxis following a bee sting while retrieving a mood ring from a bees' nest. The scene traumatized a generation of viewers and has made bees a more emotionally resonant presence in cultural memory than almost any other film on this list.

My Girl does not present bees as villains — the death results from a character's undiagnosed allergy, not from any particular bee malevolence — but it established in the minds of a significant portion of the public that bees could kill you. This is technically true but statistically overstated. Bee stings cause approximately 60 deaths per year in the United States, almost exclusively due to allergic reactions. Cars kill approximately 40,000 Americans annually, but no one cried at a car movie the way they cried at My Girl.