Honey, I’m Gone
Abandoned Beehives Are a Scientific Mystery and a Metaphor for Our Tenuous Times
Around the world, honeybees are vanishing en masse, leaving their humans engaged in a furious attempt to figure out the meaning of their exodus. Entire colonies are following the Shakespearean stage direction, “Exeunt omnes.” They’re flying off and not returning. Commercial beekeepers open their hives and find them empty except for a queen, a few immature bees and abundant honey and pollen. The rest of the bees are simply gone, leaving behind not even dead bodies.
A third of our food supply — including much of the boredom-relieving stuff, from cranberries to cucumbers — is dependent on animal pollinators like the honeybee. As a result, this mystery is rapidly joining the all-star ranks of millennial end-time run-for-your-lives threats, right up there with Y2K, mad cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS and avian flu.
…[It is possible] that some corporate bees around the world are heir to a combination of problems that may or may not be faced by honeybees kept by small-time operators, not to mention the honeybees that have escaped into the wild. All pollinators are in decline, according to a recent National Academy of Sciences study. But it is by no means clear that colony collapse disorder affects any of the 17,000 other species of bees known to exist, or the 13,000 additional species of bees estimated to exist, not to mention the 200,000 other species of animal pollinators such as beetles, butterflies, moths, hummingbirds and even bats. This also leaves aside the two-thirds of the world’s food that is pollinated not by critters, but by wind and rain, such as the grasslike crops that include corn.
None of this, however, has decreased in the slightest the buzz emanating from humans seeking moral lessons in the domesticated honeybees.
Particularly disappointed by the lack of evidence are those rooting for an indictment of the cellphone.
“We now know it isn’t cellphones, alas, alas,” says Pamela McCorduck, the futurist and author of “Machines Who Think.”
“I so longed to shut such people up with a sanctimonious ‘You’re killing the bees, you clod!’ “
I blame Islamo-fascisto-terrorists .. and their cellphones.
Respectfulness at Appomattox
Mystery Solved
The original Chickenhawk