I remember watching a movie of the week when I was a kid about “Killer Bees” that for years made me deathly afraid of the buzzing creatures, no matter how crucial they are to the world around us and the food we eat.

Their importance is central to Kate Douglas’ fascinating, futuristic and surprisingly funny play “The Apiary” now running at downtown Sarasota’s Urbanite Theatre.

The play is set about 20 years in the future, when bees have been dying off, depriving us of honey, almonds, avocados and more. But in the Kalop lab, a team of bee caregivers are trying whatever methods they can to help them survive and hopefully regenerate.

They monitor their size, activity and honey production within a small assortment of hives, rarely deviating from past methodology until they are joined by a biochemist who has more experience in the field than her checklist-wielding colleagues. They try talking to the bees about major moments in their lives, and place artificial flowers by the hives, thinking they might help their growth.

Some things work, at least briefly, others don’t, until an accident leads them to take more drastic actions that can only make you think of “Little Shop of Horrors.”. 

As strange as it may sound, it’s a delightful production staged by Producing Artistic Director Summer Wallace and featuring a strong ensemble of four actors who make even apiphobics (those with a fear of bees) care about what’s happening to them.

Terri Weagant plays four different women who become part of the experimental efforts and have a key connection to one another. Her main character is Cece, who speaks directly to the audience about growing up with bees and how her family regularly talked to them.

The small, underfunded lab is led by Ariel Blue as Gwen, an overworked cog in a corporate environment, who initially is more worried about consistency and the amount of paperwork involved than in the success of the project she’s overseeing. 

Dekyi Rongé plays an overqualified biochemist who left another lab (for unspecified reasons) because she wants to care for the bees. But she knows too much about them to be satisfied just jotting down numbers, which is the job her colleague Pilar (Christina Mei Chen) has been doing happily and regularly for five years.

They are all vastly different in background and personality, but they click together in both calm moments and when the action turns either bizarre or panicky. 

Blue, best known from her years with the Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe, keeps growing as an actress, and she plays Gwen with a bit of a hair trigger. She is overwrought from the start, but transforms over the course of the play into someone more caring and eager to try new things. Mei Chen is charming, friendly and seemingly simple-minded as Pilar, who wants to be friends with Zora despite their different attitudes and levels of education.

Rongé plays Zora with a nervous edge, as if she’s hiding some deep secret about why she’s there, or realizing she just can’t toe the line with what the job requires. She’s never quite sinister, but there’s a hint of darkness, and then horror as she realizes how far wrong her unsanctioned experiments have gone.

Scenic designer Jeff Webber has transformed the small Urbanite playing space so that the audience enters through a labyrinth of hallways leading to the seats and a view of the small lab and a lounge area. It’s appropriately sterile and clinical. Lighting designer Ethan Vail seems to make bees fly about – in a way reminiscent of Tinkerbell in a production of “Peter Pan.”

Douglas smartly uses concerns about bees to deal with a number of world issues, from a corporate approach to science, to how we treat fellow humans. 

‘The Apiary’ by Kate Douglas. Directed by Summer Wallace. Reviewed March 20, Urbanite Theatre, 1487 Second St., Sarasota. Through April 19. Tickets are $44, $30 for those 40 and younger and $5 for students. urbanitetheatre.com; 941-321-1397