Tatort star Maria Furtwängler has always been an avid insect fan. As a child, she regularly spent her summers at the lakes of Bavaria, rescuing drowning bees from the water and building them little hospitals out of leaves to revive them. Her passion for these inconspicuous crawling creatures has never left her since. Today, the hobby beekeeper owns a number of beehives, which she tends to all year round. ‘Through beekeeping, I have learned which flowers honey bees prefer to visit and what particularly attracts wild bees and butterflies. Although I have increasingly designed my garden with this in mind, it is obvious here too that there are fewer and fewer bumblebees and hoverflies every year.’

The figures are alarming: of the nearly 600 species of wild bees in Germany, half are endangered; at least 60 native butterfly species have already disappeared; and a third of Europe's hoverfly species are on the brink of extinction. Overall, 42 per cent of our insect species are considered endangered, extremely rare or already extinct.

Insects are the unsung heroes of our planet. They pollinate crops, recycle waste and serve as a food source for countless other animals. This makes them indispensable to us humans as well. But in recent decades, their numbers have declined dramatically. Why? Maria Furtwängler wants to find out in her search for clues. To do so, she meets people from research and the agricultural industry, manufacturers of plant and insect protection products, and organic and conventional farmers from the Altes Land region in northern Germany to Bavaria. In the USA, on the other hand, everything is XXL: the size of the fields, the problems that go with them, but also the creativity with high-tech solutions in robot- and computer-controlled crop cultivation.

As an advocate for insects, Furtwängler, who studied medicine, embarks on a stirring journey for ‘Erlebnis Erde’ (Experience Earth): ‘What touched me most during filming was how many of the scientists and experts spoke of an impending collapse of the global insect population. I had never heard this stated so clearly before, nor did I want to imagine it.’