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God save the queen, the apple regime
By Andrew Flohr-Spence
spencand@mscd.edu

I was never fond of bees. After a lifetime of being chased around by the tiny thugs, not to mention the traumatic experience I had a few summers ago while working as a beer-garden waiter in the middle of a bee plague, the recent news of their pesky population’s sudden disappearance seemed, at first, a good thing.

There is something sinister about their hive-mentality and lack of individuality – something about 50,000 stingers under the orders of a single queen – I just don’t trust.

On my evil-insect scale, bees are not quite as bad as, say, the blood-sucking, disease-spreading mosquito or the 6-inch poisonous centipede that once made me scream in Thailand. But what they lacked in quality, they made up in quantity. Bees are everywhere.

Or, at least, they used to be.

The honeybee is vanishing. In the last year, beekeepers from across Europe and North America have reported the loss of 30 to 80 percent of their bees. While bee populations often suffer from mysterious decline, the newly named colony collapse disorder, or CCD, is something different altogether.

This year’s numbers are unheard of. The timing of the die-off is irregular and the hives are abandoned, with a starving queen and a few workers left behind.

The creepy thing is that few dead bees have been found. Most seem to have vanished.
According to the CCD working group – an alliance of scientists, beekeepers, and concerned citizens formed to combat the problem – the bees are wandering about their daily commute, but unable to return home. Something is disrupting their navigation.

Possible causes of the bee’s disorder include bacterial infection, the effects of pesticides and artificial food, and the possibility that cell phone technology may be interfering with their radar.

As far as I was concerned, good riddance. There would be no more worries while running barefoot through the grass, and no more waiting for a mouthful of stingers when taking a sip of soda in the summer. While nature-lovers maintain that bees are industrious workers who are defending themselves when they sting, in my experience bees are mean little fascist insects who love nothing better than to kamikaze attack when least expected.

Obviously the servant life has made them edgy, ready to snap and attack at the slightest provocation. And now, the bees are suffering from the same problem humans have with driving and cell phones. Karma is a bitch.

My schadenfreude at their demise was short lived, however, when my wife reminded me of the important role the little bastards play in our food chain.

If the bees don’t come back, not only is the future of honey in doubt, but the job of pollinating a large part of our crops will urgently need to be filled.

According to a study done at Cornell in 2000, honeybees pollinate $14 billion in seeds and crops in the United States alone. About 90 different crops, including apples, zucchini, avocadoes and almonds wouldn’t be around without bees. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that every third bite in our diet is dependent on bee pollination.

So while I still believe that the devil bugs are up to some evil plot – either hiding somewhere drinking Kool-Aid under the influence of a Jonestown suicide cult, or gathering somewhere preparing for a final assault on humanity – the reality is we need to find out what is messing with the bees, even if it means shutting off our cell phones, or changing the way we treat them. Our food depends on it. And, perhaps, so do we.