Angelina Jolie is launching a second beekeeper training program in Cambodia, a year after the inaugural Guerlain x UNESCO Women for Bees Programme kicked off in France.
has found herself a perpetual student of bees. Last year, in a radical gesture of being one with nature, she posed, bare-faced and stoic, for avideo as a lazy cloud of bees tiptoed across her body. But a simpler visual is fresh in mind during a recent Zoom from her office in Los Angeles, as she lays out the importance of a healthy bee population. “Thirty percent of our food is from pollinators—that says quite a lot,” Jolie explains, at ease in an unfussy tank top.
, to meet with refugee families and aid workers. She is well known for her work as a humanitarian, having served as a special envoy to the UN refugee agency since 2011. A newer role is that of godmother to the Guerlain x UNESCO Women for Bees Programme, which launched in spring 2021 with an inaugural beekeeper training in the South of France and, as of today, a second in Cambodia. The maternal title somehow seems fitting for a humming society revolving around a queen.
The program’s expansion to Southeast Asia is something of a homecoming for Jolie. “Cambodia’s very dear to my heart, and it was where I became a mom,” she says, referring to her adopted son,—an eye-opening glimpse into a region still scarred by conflict. It wasn’t long before she started a nonprofit organization , which has been focused on removing land mines, curbing deforestation, and offering community support with schools and clinics.
This immersion into all things honey has invariably shifted Jolie’s relationship to the product. She explains by way of anecdote. “It happened to me when I worked in Cambodia on a film and we [spent time] in the rice fields. I did a course on how much it takes to get one grain of rice.” She likens the experience to a Buddhist meditation. “A lot of us who live in cities, we don’t really think about what it takes to make any food that’s on our plate.
That blurred morality, coupled with the dizzying points of concern these days, counts as a lot for even an adult brain to consider. How does Jolie handle such subjects at home? “Some of my children are from countries of conflict.is Vietnamese, and we had to adjust what he was being taught in history books,” she says. Her daughter,is from Ethiopia, another fraught place at the moment. “So it’s not a new conversation in our home.