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Max Wong was in her Mount Washington home when a neighbor, breathless with excitement, began pounding on the door.

“I was just at Home Depot, and there’s a swarm of bees out front,” he told her.

Like any bee rescuer and beekeeping advocate, Wong sprang into action. She reached for her protective gear — veil, jacket and gloves — and set off to go trap the swarm with help from her boyfriend and fellow beekeeper, Stephen Ratter.

The couple is part of what Wong calls “the honeybee underground.”

In cities across the country, there’s a grass-roots movement afoot to preserve bees, and it’s all in response to the phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder.

Bees are abruptly disappearing from hives as documented in the new film “Vanishing of the Bees,” narrated by Ellen Page, and nobody knows why.

But there are theories.

The documentary — first seen at film festivals and arriving June 7 on video-on-demand and DVD — explores several possibilities, including bloodsucking Varroa mites that weaken adult bees and their developing brood, and agricultural practices such as spraying pesticides and trucking in commercially bred bees from across state lines to pollinate crops.