The girl leaves after a few nights, before the movie ends with Spyros turning over his beehive boxes, causing him to be stung repeatedly by the understandably angry bees.

Janet Maslin criticized The Beekeeper in 1993, writing that it "wastes Marcello Mastroianni in his title role" and that "(n)ot even those inclined to dwell on the film's occasional honeycomb imagery or its heavy sense of foreboding will find much to command the attention," arguing that The Beekeeper is interesting only in the context of Angelopoulos's other two titles in his "trilogy of silence" (which also includes Voyage to Cythera and Landscape in the Mist).

"[5] John Gillett for a London Film Festival screening praised The Beekeeper as having "wonderfully textured images by Arvanitis, a succession of beautifully sustained traveling shots, and an emotional intensity which moves to a grave, overwhelming climax.

[7] In The Independent, however, Holly Williams in 2010 lauded the film as "ponderously paced but poignant" and stated that "the directing is assured, and the performances restrained and heartbreakingly believable.

"[8] Acquarello of Strictly Film School[9] called the work "a haunting, compassionate, and profoundly melancholic portrait of isolation, dislocation, estrangement, and obsolescence," referring to it as an "indelible chronicle" of the contemporary Greek society.