Bees abandoning a sinking ship

A few years ago, during one of the approximately eleven billion Capitol Hill press conferences in any given year (this is not a political article, so stick with me here), Newt Gingrich and Hillary Clinton did the unthinkable: they agreed - openly - on a number of issues, most shockingly on health care. This was, of course, prior to The Newt calling her a nasty woman, so everything - whew - appears correct with the world again. But at the time, Ms. Rodham announced that their confluence of philosophies, however ephemeral it may have been, was a sure sign of the apocalypse.

It takes quite a mighty ego to assert that one's own opinion is a portent to biblical events. However, Hillary may have been on to something. There are, indeed, many contemporary indications floating in the ether which may signify an imminent coming of the end times, but they aren't in the form of a political dovetailing between two bitter adversaries. Instead of looking at the thoughts of former backbenchers and junior carpetbaggers, we can turn to nature to see apparent indications that there is something not quite right.

Have you noticed that there don't appear to be many yellow jackets flying around lately? I hadn't, actually, but once it had been mentioned to me, I realized that it had been quite a while since I've seen even one. Wasps seem to buzz my tower regularly. A massive bumble bee, the size of a small child, collided with my temple (the one on my head) just a few hours ago. Bastard was lucky I wasn't carrying a squash racquet, like I usually do.

But the average, ordinary, everyday black and yellow bee? I honestly can not remember the last time I swatted one away, just making him angry.

Not that I have a big problem with any dearth of stinging insects. As a 16-year old, I was employed on the grounds crew of my great uncle's estate in central Connecticut. My uncle wasn't hurting for money – he helped invent the idea of the hedge fund – and as such had a palatial house surrounded by over a hundred acres of the most beautiful rolling greenery one can imagine. He had his own groundskeeper, whose house was on the premises. When someone gets that rich, they start coming up with creative ways to spend their money, and my uncle decided to divert the local creek into his property, creating two man-made ponds (including a small waterfall flowing from one to the other – I mean, why not?), with an accompanying nature trail circling them both.

One day, my uncle decided that the discarded brush which was cleared to create the nature trail was creating an eyesore along the shores of his lower pond, and ordered the crew to remove it, however we deemed possible. I was put in charge of clearing one particularly large bundle of dead sticks, weeds and bushes, one that resembled the hair of a Medusian crack whore to the power of ten. With much reluctance, I eventually pounced into the pile and began organizing the jumble into a form which could more easily be removed.

What I didn't know what that there was a massive, active honey bee hive buried within the untidy heap, the residents of which were quite alarmed to discover me messing with their domicile. I remember asking my mother as a toddler, "Do bees know they're going to die when they sting somebody?" That day, I received my answer: no, they sure as hell don't, or at least they certainly do not care. Sting first and ask questions later.

As the story has been told throughout the years, the precise number of stings I received has surely increased. In reality, there's no way to know exactly, because on one area of my left leg, I suffered so many attacks that the individual welts were not visible anymore; my calf became one large, swollen mass of crimson irritation. In all, I was certainly stung at least several dozen times, probably about 50, give or take.

After that, I was not exactly an active member of the bee fan club.

Later, upon wondering why we don't just nuke those damn stinging nuisances back to the Stone Age, I learned that bees of all varieties play a very important role in the food chain, and more directly, in the food supply of human beings. Honey bees in particular are responsible the reproduction (via pollination) of about a third of all the crops in the U.S.

Read that sentence again if it didn't sink in. One third of all crops! This includes pretty much every kind of fruit and nut you can name. Granted, there are other insects which can pollinate some of these crop species, but not all, and certainly not on the vast scale which honey bees operate. Every major commercial farming company in America relies on these bees to do their Darwinian thing.

What is so alarming is that they are disappearing on an unusually vast scale.

Like an insect version of a whale pod of beaching themselves for no apparent reason, honey bees everywhere are simply leaving their hives, flying out into the field, and dying. While somewhat similar occurrences have happened in the past to honey bee populations, the death and disappearing rates have never been so prolific or widespread as they are today. The problem is so severe that scientists have actually come up with a name for it – Colony Collapse Disorder (I'm convinced I have CCD as well).

The effect of CCD is very widespread, affecting half the states in the union, as well as several European countries and Canadian provinces. More than a quarter of all the bee colonies in this country have been lost. Several theories have been floated in an effort to try and account for the phenomena, ranging from past known problems in the bee community such as mite infestations, to the absurd, such as cell phone signals throwing their natural radar off. Everyone knows bees are not able to clip cell phones to their fuzzy little backsides.

Other, more realistic sources of the calamity include pesticides, hormones in the food supply, erratic weather patterns caused by global warming, parasites, poor nutrition (those bees always did have a weakness for Ding Dongs and Cool Ranch Doritos), and the like. One beekeeper in Texas honestly asserted that it might be Queen Bee smugglers bringing in unwanted pests. (For the record - if you are a Queen Bee smuggler, you really need to (a) get a real illegal job, and (b) receive a rigorous ass-kicking for being such a wanker). However, despite the best efforts of scientists, they have come up with no single, plausible explanation for the sudden drop in honey bee populations.

A group of Entomologists (that's French for "extra geeky") met last week in Maryland to try and ferret out why the bees are dropping like flies. So far, despite all they know about the birds and the bees, they haven't come up with anything as of yet. And these scientists are the bee's knees in the field.

I think I know what it is.

The honey bees around the world have been watching way too much television (apparently they only get Fox News and MSNBC in the hive) and they've become irreconcilably depressed at the state of things in the world, and they sense with their little antennae that the end of the world is nigh. They've seen what's going on in Iraq, they know about the essentially insurmountable debt and starvation many countries have, they see no end to the bloodshed in the Middle East, they can't stop genocide in Africa, they are perplexed at why people buy guns and massacre people they've never met, and they are uniquely attuned to global climate changes that have been adversely affecting Mother Earth.

Keith Richards – who knows a little something about survival – once wrote "I want to walk before they make me run." In the case of the bees, they know a dying planet when they see one, and they just want to fly before we make them … um … fly really fast.

In short, the bees are getting the hell out of dodge, catching that one last buzz before flying out into the sunset. And who could blame them.

Evan Redmon is a manager of a public golf course in Washington, D.C. and writes a few things about stuff sometimes. Contact him at evanredmon@yahoo.com if you really want.