FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Film’s digital shorts series “The Collectors” continues today with the debut of “Beekeeper” directed by Steven Cantor. The short film, which premiered during the Sundance Film Festival, documents the fight to save the declining population of honey bees, who pollinate $18 billion worth of food in America.

The film introduces Dennis van Engelsdorp, former state apiarist for Pennsylvania and current entomology professor at the University of Maryland, who explains the essential role each bee plays in its 30,000-member colony.  In addition to a number of factors destroying the 2.5 million colonies in the United States, van Engelsdorp describes the dangers of a bee disease caused by “vampire mites” and shares the work his team of beekeepers is doing to prevent it.

The Collectors is a ten-film series available exclusively on FiveThirtyEight, WatchESPN and ABC News that tells the stories of an eclectic group of characters collecting data, ranging from the official scorer at a baseball game, to a meteorologist tracking hurricanes. Each of the shorts depicts how these individuals gather information, and how their judgment in translating ambiguity into hard numbers can shape how the world is viewed and interpreted. The series, which is a project out of ESPN content unit Exit 31, debuted on Dec. 10, 2014 with “Food Cartographers.”

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