City of Wax is a 1934 short film directed by Horace and Stacy Woodard.
It is a nature documentary about honeybees. The film starts by showing a tree somewhere, and explains that a colony of bees has established a hive there. The film shows the bees constructing their "city" out of wax, collecting pollen from flowers, and making honey. Then it discusses the role of the queen, who mates with a drone and lays eggs. Finally, when the queen exhausts her ability to lay eggs, she is killed by the hive and a new queen is born, and the cycle starts again.
Tropes:
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: Almost the whole documentary, which is a series of close-up shots of bees in a hive. If that doesn't count, then there's the closeup of flowers in a field as the bees land on them to get pollen.
- Book Ends: The film starts with a shot of a tree while explaining that a colony of bees is making a hive there. It then ends with the same shot of the tree, as the narrator talks about how bees will make hives "long after man has ceased to exist."
- Narrative-Driven Nature Documentary: Predates the Trope Codifier True-Life Adventures from Disney by over a decade. The beehive is referred to throughout as a "city" and the bees are talked bout as if they are people. When a bee from outside tries to creep into the hive the narrator says "Cautiously the robber comes forward." In one scene as worker bees surround the queen, the film states matter-of-factly that bees "talk" with their antennae. They are said to be concerned with the queen's declining fertility, with the narrator saying "The queen's delay is causing a discussion."
- Narrator: A narrator tells the story of a beehive.
- Nature Documentary: One of the first films to focus specifically on wildlife, as opposed to historical or travel documentaries. Nature documentary shorts would become very popular in Hollywood, although nature documentary features wouldn't come around for a couple more decades.
- Old Maid: Part of the anthropomorphic description of the bees, as a worker bee is described as "living her life in spinsterhood" before working herself to death.
- The Place: The city of wax, aka a beehive.
- Title Drop: The narrator says "It is a law in the city of wax that only one queen can reign at a time" while explaining why the workers kill the old queen while breeding a new one.
- The X of Y: City of Wax
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness
- The narration describes how the worker been kill all the (male) drones after the queen is fertilized, going into detail about how the workers tear the drones apart before throwing them onto a "burial ground".
- That's after the drone that fertilizes the queen is killed by her in midair after the act.
- Once the queen is unable to lay eggs anymore, the workers crush her to death, and then breed a new queen.
